Data Policies in Economic Journals: What Data Authors have to provide beside the Manuscript?

As mentioned in some of my previous blogposts we analyzed more than 140 economic scholarly journals regarding their data availability policies. It has been an interesting work checking the quality and the extend of these data policies.

In our sample (that was evaluated in 2011 by the German Economics Bräuninger, Haucap and Muck regarding the reputation and relevance of these journals) we were able to find 29 journals equipped with a data availability policy and 11 journals that own a so called “replication policy”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thompson Reuters announces Start of „Data Citation Index“

Thomson Reuters, known for the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) or the Web of Knowledge, has announced to start a “data citation index (DCI).”

This new index will incorporate content from data sets and data studies deposited in over 80 established, curated repositories, from around the World, multidisciplinary coverage across social sciences, physical sciences, life sciences and arts and humanities.  The aim of the DCI is to facilitate the discovery, use and attribution and data studies, and link those data to peer reviewed literature.

Read the rest of this entry »

Requirements for Data Availability Policies to enable Replications

In our analyses for work package 2 we collected some criteria to evaluate the quality of the data policies we found in our sample.

It was important to identify some core requirements that aim to ensure the replicability of economic research.  This was not an easy task, because we had to find some criteria that are suitable for many fields of research in economics.

Therefore we consulted several research papers and used the recommendations we found in the papers as a basis for analysing and assessing the suitability of data availability policies of economics journals in our study.

We’d like to discuss these criteria with our readers. Feel free to submit comments or send me an e-mail.

Read the rest of this entry »

Big Data in the Humanities and Social Siences? Yes – there’s a bunch of it!

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) issued the first public appraisal of the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant programme first funded by JISC, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Their findings are presented in a report called One Culture – Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, along with a series of recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, academic publishers, research libraries, and funding agencies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Research Data Registration Service launched

The National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), as Canada’s national science library, has launched a research data registration service that will help the research community address a long-standing challenge to make valuable research data easier to find so they can be leveraged and exploited for other research purposes.

NRC-CISTI has established DataCite Canada to serve as a central research dataset registration service that will enable Canadian data centres to register research datasets and assign digital object identifiers (DOIs) to them. As the name suggests, DataCite Canada is a member of the DataCite Consortium. DataCite is part of the International DOI Foundation (IDF). Read the rest of this entry »

Second Phase of our Survey just started

The EDaWaX Project today has send a reminder to 350 editors of economic journals to fill out the online questionnaire dealing with data availability policies in scholarly journals. One of the questionnaire was designed for journals without data policies; the second questionnaire was created for journals that already own a data policy.

Read the rest of this entry »

German Bibliothekartag: EDaWaX presents first Findings

On Thursday -24th of may- I presented first findings of our research project in a session on research data at the 101st German Bibliothekartag, managed by Goportis, the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information. Up to 100 colleques heard the presentation and some interesting questions were raised.

For introducing my presentation I gave a short overview on the project’s aims and our three project phases. Also the expected outcome and our project partners were introduced.

Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX-Project launches Online-Surveys for Editors of Economic Scholarly Journals

The EDaWaX Project today has launched two online questionnaire for editors of scholarly journals. One of the questionnaire was designed for journals without data policies, whereas the second questionnaire was created for journals that already own a data policy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Digital Curation Centre refreshed their catalogue of tools and services

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has just refreshed and replenished their catalogue of tools and services for managing and curating research data.

Beside a new look the catalogue has been overhauled to focus on software and services that directly perform curation and management tasks.
Read the rest of this entry »

Monash University releases Research Data Management Strategy 2012-2015

Monash University in Australia has released a strategy for managing research data. The strategy was jointly developed by the University Library, the Monash e-Research Centre and the university’s enterprise IT group, eSolutions.

Monash University is active in RDM already for many years – milestones since 2006 include:

Read the rest of this entry »

OSF- Reproducibility Project tries to replicate the results published in three psychological journals

“If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous…”. With this statement Tom Bartlett introduced his article  “Is Psychology About to Come Undone?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The source of his fears is the Reproducibility Project  – a group of researchers that aim to replicate every study within the three journals Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition published in the year 2008.

The project is part of Open Science Framework (OSF), a group that is interested in increasing the alignment between scientific values and scientific practices. Despite developing some tools and infrastructure projects its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of published psychological science.”

Read the rest of this entry »

EC-Survey on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Open Science matters!

These days, the European Commission has just published the results of a consultation regarding accessibility and preservation of digital publications and research data in the European Union.

Commissioner Neelie Kroes, responsible for the digital agenda for Europe, has launched this consultation in July 2011 for seeking views on access to and preservation of digital scientific information – to be more precisely, the survey broached the issues of Open Access for scientific publications, accessibility of research data and digital long term preservation.

The purpose of the consultation was to gather information from as many sources as possible and receive important input for the future development of policy options in the area of scientific information in the digital age.

Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing re3data.org – Developing a Registry of Research Data Repositories #Update

On Friday I read some news about the project re3data.org. This introduction may be interesting for our readers too, so I ‘m documenting the press release here:

More and more universities and research centres are starting to build research data repositories allowing permanent access to data sets in a trustworthy environment. Due to disciplinary requirements, the landscape of data repositories is very heterogeneous. Thus it is difficult for researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions to select appropriate repositories for storage and search of research data.

The goal of re3data.org is to create a global registry of research data repositories.

Read the rest of this entry »

Linking and lightening: LabArchives and BioMed Central create a new platform for publishing scientific data

Sharing and reuse of data has become a vital part of modern scientific research. Having access to datasets ensures that the pace of scientific discovery is not unnecessarily hindered by data being kept under lock and key or hidden away in lab drawers.

In this context I read some interesting news: As part of the commitment to reproducible research and transparency, BioMed Central has now partnered with LabArchives to work together for the shared goal of making datasets supporting peer-reviewed publications available and permanently linked to online publications – and available under terms which permit reuse freely, as Open Data.

Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX-Project wins LIBER Award for Library Innovation 2012

At the end of last week I received an E-Mail from the LIBER Executive Director that congratulates our project for winning the LIBER Award for Library Innovation 2012! These are really great news!

Our abstract:  “Data Management in Scholarly Journals and Possible Roles for Libraries – Some Insights from EDaWaX” was among the top three papers that were submitted to the conference.

Read the rest of this entry »