Report of the 1st national RDA Germany Meeting is online

On November 20/21 the first national RDA Meeting Germany was held in Potsdam. More than 100 participants followed the presentations and discussions. One aim of the meeting was to inform interested people and institutions about RDA’s activities.

On the first day of the conference there were many presentations to inform about the results RDA has yet archived as well as the governance structure that has been defined for RDA. In addition, some perspectives for the future work of the RDA-IGs and WGs have been discussed. Read the rest of this entry »

New KE-Publication: “Sowing the seed” #Update

A few days ago,  Knowledge Exchange (KE) – a cooperation of five national funding organisations (DFG, Surf, DEFF, CSC and JISC) – has just released a new publication, titled “Sowing the seed: Incentives and motivations for sharing research data, a researchers’ perspective.”

This qualitative study has gathered evidence, examples and opinions on current and future incentives for research data sharing from the researchers’ point of view, in order to provide recommendations for policy and practice development on how best to incentivize data access and re-use.

Incentives and motivations ask for development of a data infrastructure with rich context where research data, papers and other outputs or resources are jointly available within a single data resource. Different types of data sharing and research disciplines need to be acknowledged. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Access to Data: An Ideal Professed but not Practised

The two economists Patrick Andreoli-Versbach and Frank Mueller-Langer (both from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich) have published a new paper in Research Policy in which they analyse the data-sharing behaviour of 488 randomly selected empirical researchers.*

Andreoli-Versbach and Mueller-Langer (2014) provide evidence that most researchers in economics and management do not share their data voluntarily. The authors Read the rest of this entry »

Biomedical Sciences: Journals unite to forster reproducible research

When it comes to the topic of replication, it always is a good idea to consult the webpages of the nature journal. Yesterday, for instance, the journal reported that a group of editors representing more than 30 major journals, representatives from funding agencies as well as scientific leaders discussed principles and guidelines for preclinical biomedical research in June 2014.

The gathering was convened by the US National Institutes of Health, Nature and Science.

The attendees agreed on a common set of principles and guidelines in reporting preclinical research that list proposed journal policies and author reporting requirements in order to promote transparency and reproducibility. Read the rest of this entry »