“Research Data at your Fingertips”: German Priority Initiative ‘Digital Information’ publishes Position Paper

 The Priority Initiative Digital Information of the Alliance of German Science Organisations has published a position paper on research data and research data infrastructures in February.

At the beginning the four page long paper sketches a short vision on how researchers will be able to work with research data in the year 2025. A “quick and easy access to all research data” is part of this vision, also the important task to credit researchers for sharing their research data is mentioned by the authors: “The publication of research data and software enhances the academic reputation.”

The second chapter of the paper deals with the current challenges in managing research data. Especially the situation in organisational structures, different research disciplines, publicly funded information institutions and research organisations is described. Read the rest of this entry »

Save the date: Workshop “Open data, restricted data and the role of libraries”

NEREUS – a network of European libraries in Economics and Social Sciences –  is happy to announce a pre-conference workshop (2015-6-23 in London) at this year’s LIBER-Conference.

Open Science and open data have become hot topics in recent years. Effective research data management is more and more postulated by research funders. Research infrastructure providers worldwide are busy building up various services and tools for researchers to support them within their research and the management of research data. But how successful are these approaches and their impact in supporting research? How open could or should data be and which role(s) libraries can play to support researchers effectively? Read the rest of this entry »

Paper on the Incentives for Academic Data Sharing published: „What Drives Academic Sharing?“

Benedikt Fecher, Sascha Friesike, and Marcel Hebing have published another paper presenting further results of their study concerning academic data sharing. Since data sharing enables researchers to verify results and to pursuit new research questions with “old” data, it is of particular importance for scientific progress.

Fecher, Friesike, and Hebing conducted a systematic review of 98 scholarly papers as well as an empirical survey among 603 secondary data users. In order to explain the data sharing process from the primary researcher’s point of view, the authors introduce a conceptual framework based on the analyses. They divide the data sharing process into six descriptive categories: data donor, research organization, research community, norms, data infrastructure, and data recipients. Read the rest of this entry »