Adapting CKAN for Open Research Data

One aim of EDaWaX is to develop and implement a web-platform prototype for a publication-related research data archive. We’ve chosen CKAN –an open source data portal platform– as basis for this prototype.

This post describes the reasons for this decision and tries to give some insights in CKAN, its features and technology. We’ll also discuss these features both in regard to our special use case and to the suitability for research data management in general.

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European Commission: Open access to research publications reaching ‘tipping point’…but what about the data?

The European Commission (EC) has released a press statement in which the EC claimed that “the global shift towards making research findings available free of charge for readers—so-called ‘open access’ is reaching ‘tipping point’.”

This enthusiastic view of the Commission is based on three studies that that have been funded by the EC:

One study analysed the growth of open access publications, a second evaluated the strategies of funders to enforce open access and the a third addressed open access to scientific data. Read the rest of this entry »

Endorse the Open Economics Principles!

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the Open Economics Working Group has just finalised the Open Economic Principles. Now it is also possible to endorse these principles online.  In an e-mail the working group announces:

The Open Economics Working Group would like to introduce the Open Economics Principles, a Statement on Openness of Economic Data and Code. A year and a half ago the Open Economics project began with a mission of becoming central point of reference and support for those interested in open economic data. In the process of identifying examples and ongoing barriers for opening up data and code for the economics profession, we saw the need to present a statement on the guiding principles of transparency and accountability in economics that would enable replication and scholarly debate as well as access to knowledge as a public good. Read the rest of this entry »

Metadata for publication-related Data Archives: As much as necessary and as little as posssible

In the course of our project we had to deal with a work package (WP5) in which we had to develop (or at least to choose) a metadata schema capable of describing and labelling publication-related metadata. Today I would like to summarize our approach and some of our thoughts for choosing an appropriate metadata schema.

I already characterised our approach in my talk at the IASSIST 2013 conference, but I would like to describe it more in-depth to start a discussion with researchers and the community, so feel free to comment.

In a first move we evaluated the data and further materials we found in the data archives of economics journals. These types of data we found within the journals’ data archives were seen as functional requirements, because the metadata schema should be capable to describe these data.

We focussed on a schema that should be capable to describe quantitative data – mainly because qualitative approaches are rare in Economics. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Economics Working Group: Many activities in the last weeks

Despite rising temperatures and beginning summer holidays all across Europe, the Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation was very active within the last weeks. I would like to single out a few of these activities:

• On June 11-12 the Second Open Economics International Workshop took place. This second of two international workshops funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, aimed at bringing together economists and senior academics, funders, data publishers and data curators in order to discuss the progress made in the field of open data for economics and the still existing challenges. The topics and the programme were very interesting – and so is the recap of the event, written by Velichka Dimitrova, coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. One of our project partners, Prof. Dr. Gert G. Wagner, chairman of the German Data Forum (RatSWD), also took part and  gave a lecutre on “the culture of data sharing in economics.” Read the rest of this entry »

English translation of the Project synthesis “Framework for an inter-disciplinary research data infrastructure” published

The German project RADIESCHEN / radish (Rahmenbedingungen einer disziplinübergreifenden Forschungsdateninfrastruktur /Framework for an inter-disciplinary research data infrastructure) has published the project’s synthesis in English. The objective of this DFG-funded project was the development of a roadmap and recommendations for a multi-disciplinary research data infrastructure in Germany.

The project team identified requirements for generic components of existing infrastructures and potential for cross-linking of multi-disciplinary components. The resulting analysis is based on a survey of existing and new projects and includes measures for community building. Key aspects of the analysis are the technical components of the infrastructure, the cost model and the investigation of cross-disciplinary topics.

Photo: “Lachdieschen” by dwarslöper / flickr.com. License: CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 DE

Introducing the OJS-Dataverse Integration Project

Today I want to introduce the PKP- Open Journal System / Dataverse Integration Project to our readers, an approach that is in some parts quite similar to our own approach in the field of economics.

Funded by a $1 million Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, the OJS-DVN project intends to develop a plugin for journals that are using the Open Journal System (OJS), a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), to expand and improve access to research. Read the rest of this entry »

American Economic Association launches Registry for RCTs.

Patrick McNeal reported on openeconomics.net, that the American Economic Association (AEA) has recently launched a registry for randomized controlled trials in economics. Explaing the reasons why the registry has been implemented, the AEA stated:

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are widely used in various fields of economics and other social sciences. As they become more numerous, a central registry on which trials are on-going or complete (or abandoned) becomes important for various reasons: as a source of results for meta-analysis; as a one-stop resource to find out about available survey instruments and data.

Because existing registries are not well suited to the need for social sciences, in April 2012, the AEA executive committee decided to establish such a registry for economics and other social sciences.

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EDaWaX: New Article published

Last year our project won the LIBER-Award for Library Innovation 2012. Now our paper was published in LIBER-Quarterly, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association of European Research Libaries.

Photo: “Tippen” by Jorma Bork / pixelio.de. License:>click<

Research data goes open access – Horizon 2020 will enable mandatory publication of research

In February, the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics initiated a meeting of experts from across Europe as well as representatives of the European Commission and ERCEA (Executive Agency of the ERC) at the Brussels office of the Leibniz Association in order to formulate recommendations for a policy regarding the open access publication of research data. Read the rest of this entry »

New Nature Special: Challenges in irreproducible Research

nature has published a new special issue on challenges in irreproducible research. The journal addresses the challenges and barriers of reproducibel research:

No research paper can ever be considered to be the final word, and the replication and corroboration of research results is key to the scientific process. In studying complex entities, especially animals and human beings, the complexity of the system and of the techniques can all too easily lead to results that seem robust in the lab, and valid to editors and referees of journals, but which do not stand the test of further studies. Nature has published a series of articles about the worrying extent to which research results have been found wanting in this respect. The editors of Nature and the Nature life sciences research journals have also taken substantive steps to put our own houses in order, in improving the transparency and robustness of what we publish. Journals, research laboratories and institutions and funders all have an interest in tackling issues of irreproducibility. We hope that the articles contained in this collection will help.

All articles within this issue are available free of charge. The table of contents is available here.

Graphic: pasukaru76, www.flickr.com

Why Replications & Data Availability matter: The Case of Rogoff and Reinhart

Chart by Reinhart/Rogoff

Yesterday several blogs, journals and news agencies spread the news: The US star economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart are in trouble, because a paper of them -which had and has a considerable influence on worldwide economic policy- contains at least one serious error.

Their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” was published in the flagship of economic research – the American Economic Review (AER) with also has a data availability policy that was evaluated in the course of our research project.
Important political assumptions and decisions were based on the research of Rogoff and Reinhart:  Olli Rehm, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission and also the US-Republican Paul Ryan argued with the findings of Rogoff and Reinhart to justify austerity economics. Read the rest of this entry »

New Knowledge Exchange Publication: “The Value of Research Data”

Last week I’ve been in Berlin and took part in the workshop “Making Data Count: Research data availability and research assessment” hosted by Knowledge Exchange (KE), a 2005 established cooperation between five research funders.

The aim of the workshop was to bring experts and stakeholders from research institutions, universities, scholarly societies and funding agencies together in order to review, discuss and build on possibilities to implement the culture of sharing and to integrate publication of data into research assessment procedures. Read the rest of this entry »

JoRD Project presents Results

The JoRD-project (Journal Research Data Policies ) recently has published some final results. As mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, the JoRD-project -which was funded by JISC as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme- aims to conduct a feasibility study into the scope and shape of a sustainable service that will collate and summarise journal data policies. The purpose of the service would be to provide a ready reference source of easily accessible, standardised, accurate and clear guidance and information, on the journal policy landscape relating to research data. Read the rest of this entry »

The darkest site of scholarly publishing

Today I read an incredible story- published by Declan Butler in the very informative nature special issue on “the future of publishing.”

Most of us know about the massive profit margins scholarly publishers earn every year. According to Björn Brembs the corporate scholarly publishing industry with roughly four billion US$ in profit every year, is a lucrative business. For example Reed Elsevier just published his “Annual Reports and Financial Statements” for 2012 – despite the Elsevier-Boycott in 2012 the company achieved revenues of £ 6.116 billion in 2012.

But as Butler reports in nature (“Sham journals scam authors“) also cybercriminals have understood that they can earn a lot of money with faking existing journals. But what has happened? Read the rest of this entry »