Report describes information practices in the physical sciences

The Research Information Network (RIN), the Institute of Physics (IOP), Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) and the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in the UK have just commissioned a report that examines information practices in the physical sciences. It follows the previous case studies in the life sciences and the humanities.

This report uses seven case studies (particle physics, astrophysics gamma ray burst, nuclear physics, chemistry, earth science, nanoscience and users of the zooniverse platform) to understand how researchers in the physical sciences find, access, use and share information.

In the introduction the authors stated:

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RatSWD-Newsletter: EDaWaX Project introduced

The German Data Forum (RatSWD) has just published its current newsletter. Beside many other interesting articles, book reviews, event notes etc., on page 3 a description of the EDaWaX-Project is included (see below).

I’m sorry for our international visitors, but the article and the whole newsletter is available in German only.

Additionally I want to point the attention of our readers to another publication (in German) of the German Data Forum: Prof. Gerd G. Wagner and D. Huschka published a comment on the nature magazine’s special issue “data replication and reproducibility.”

You’ll find the working paper 194 “Datenverfügbarkeit reicht nicht, um Replikationsstudien zur Routine zu machen” in the Download section of this blog or on the website of the German Data Forum.

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US Research Works Act Proposal – a new approach to attack Open Access? #Updates

In the course of my research for data policies of economic scholarly journals for the work package 2 of the EDaWaX-project, I stumbled on the proposal H.R. 3699 of the US House of Representatives with claims “To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”

First I thought, >okay, just another proposal, nothing to worry about<, but when I read more about it, my opinion changed.

From my personal point of view this proposal would seriously threaten public access to federally funded research in the US, when it becomes law. And the question following is, what will happen in Europe, when the publishers succeed in the US?

And this is not only my own perspective: There are libraries and researchers that got upset, too.

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Introducing DRYAD

Today I want to introduce Dryad – maybe many of you know it already because it is not a project that has  just started, but a repository that was initially released in 2008.

As mentioned, Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences, including biomedicine.

Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies.

Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository. Actually, Dryad contains 1228 data packages and 2953 data files, associated with articles in 100 journals.

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OpenAIREplus launched – linking peer-reviewed literature to associated data

In early December 2011 the Open Aire Plus Project was launched – the project is designed to run 30 months and is funded by the EU. The aim of the project is providing cross-links from publications to data and funding schemes.

OpenAireplus brings together 41 pan-European partners, including three cross-disciplinary research communities.

The project will build on the efforts of the OpenAIRE Project, that enables Researchers to deposit their research publications that were funded by ERA or FP7 into OA-Repositories.

In the copurse of the project, the current publication repository networks will be expanded to attract data providers from domain specific scientific areas.

Creating a robust, participatory service for the cross-linking of peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated datasets is the principal goal of OpenAIREplus. As scholarly communication touches upon many disciplines, the project’s horizontal outreach will facilitate collaboration across data infrastructures, providing information to scientists, non-scientists as well as to providers of value-added services. The project will establish an e-Infrastructure to harvest, enrich and store the metadata of Open Access scientific datasets. Underlying technical structures will be deployed to support the management of and inter-linking between associated scientific data.

Dr. Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of the project and Director of Goettingen State and University Library states:

“The participatory design of OpenAIREplus will seamlessly guide the researcher to Open Access research data. The experienced consortium will pave the way to support the research work of European scientists and open up the road to multi-disciplinary science”