Merry Christmas – and a happy new year!

The year draws to a close – therefore the EDaWaX-project team wants to thank our partners, funders and readers for a successful year!

Again, 2015 has been a year full of thrilling events and developments within our project. This year’s focal point primarily was on the advancement of our CKAN-based application. In the first quarter of 2016 we will present more information on the future of the EDaWaX-application and in which direction the project will move after the end of the funding period in May 2016.

Since the start of the second funding period, we implemented a lot of new functionalities. For instance, it is possible to register DataCite-DOIs (digital object identifiers) for submitted research data directly from the application’s frontend. We also slightly improved CKAN’s user and right management to make it more suitable for an utilisation in the context of journal’s data archives. One result is that authors and editorial offices now receive e-mail notifications on recent activities within the data archive.

But we also changed some things based on feedback from the community: For example, we completely overhauled the metadata fields and the web frontend for uploading data. Now it is much catchier for researchers to submit their data to our application.

Read the rest of this entry »

How scientific infrastructure providers currently support RDM in the social sciences

Though some months have passed, again I would like to draw our reader’s attention on a workshop that took already place in June in London. Organised by nereus, the European network of leading social science libraries, the workshop “Open Data, Restricted Data and the Library Role – Practical Cases in Economics and Social Sciences” featured presentations from several notable institutions who discussed their experiences of establishing research data management and RDM services. These presentations highlighted the various demands researchers face in this area and also the role(s) especially libraries can play in the administration or management of open and restricted research data.

Read the rest of this entry »

Austria: New report “Researchers and their Data” published

A solid research data management system is the foundation of cooperative, open research. In addition such a system fosters reproducibility and verifiability of research.

This topic is relevant and up-to-date for researchers, funding bodies and senior posts of scientific institutions, which is currently also underpinned by the pilot for research data of the European Commission.

In this context, the project e-Infrastructures Austria has just released a report that provides an overview of an Austria-wide survey on research data. The survey was carried out at the beginning of 2015. It was directed at the scientific and artistic-scientific personnel of all 21 public universities and three extramural research institutions in Austria.

The project received 3026 completed questionnaires, which is equivalent to an average response rate of 9 %. Read the rest of this entry »