EDaWaX presents its work in Washington D.C. and Cambridge in December

The end of the year is coming nearer – for our project it will be an interesting year-end closing, because we’ll be on site at two very interesting meetings:

First at December 11 – 12, we’ll be in Washington D.C., USA, where we’re presenting some results of our research project in a session of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2012 Membership Meeting.

A few days later we’ll present our project at the First Open Economics International Workshop in Cambridge, UK, hosted by the Open Economics Working Group.

# Update: 2012-12-10: Bad news: Because of heavy snowfalls in Germany may flights were canceled. Unfortunately this also applied to our flight to Washington DC – so we’ll not be able to attend the CNI Membership Meeting.

Photo: Gianfranco Chicco | flickr.com

EDaWaX: First paper published! #Update

I am happy to announce that some of the results we obtained in our analyses have been published in the proceedings of the WissKom2012 conference (pp.29 ff).

In the research paper for Wisskom2012 Olaf Siegert and I summarized some of the findings of the EDaWaX project.  Unfortunately the paper is available in German only, but I promise to publish some more of our major findings in English – eighter on this blog or in a seperate paper. Some results of our analyses are already published here: ( |1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | )

The presentation I gave in Jülich is available in the download section of the blog.

I also wrote a paper in English that has already been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal. I hope to find time to rework the article and to integrate the very helpful notes and comments of the reviewers anytime soon.

I’ll come back to you, when I’ve got news.

# Update 2012-11-14 #

A slightly updated version of the paper is also available now. It has been published in Working Paper Series of the German Data Forum (RatSWD), No. 210. The RatSWD Working Papers series was launched at the end of 2007. Since 2009, the series has been publishing exclusively conceptual and historical works dealing with the organization of the German statistical infrastructure and research infrastructure in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences.

Data Policies in Open Access Journals: Not all that glitters is “gold”

At the end of September, I was in beautifull Vienna for some days and presented a few results of our project at the 6th Open Access Days in a session about “Making Research Data publicly available: opportunities and challenges“.
It’s been a very nice conference – and some blogposts [Uli Herb -> telepolis (in German) | Astrid Recker -> admtic (in English)] report on the conference and some of the presentations. My colleques Olaf Siegert, Ralf Flohr and I also wrote a summary of the conference for ZfBB (in German) that will be published in the next issue of the journal.

Well, to come back to my talk:  In this post I want to point out some single aspects of my presentation: the availability of data policies in economic scholarly journals that are published open access.
Our project compared the number and quality of data policies we found in a sample of 43 open access Journals to a sample of 141 traditional subscription journals in regard to the implementation of data availability policies.

Generally speaking I wondered how open access journals acquit themselves in this context. Prior to starting our analysis I was quite sure that the percentage of journals equipped with a data availability policy would be higher in open access journals than the proportion of subscription journals equipped with such a policy. I even thought that open access journals could have a comparative advantage to traditional subscription journals: Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

EDaWaX WP2: Some Information about Journals and Selection of our Analysis

Today I want to share some parts of our current research with you. While writing our report on the work package 2, I thought it would be a good idea to publish some of my thoughts – it helps to structure all the information we have.
I start with a brief introduction about the selection of scholarly journals for our research work. Surely this will be only a small excerpt of the whole information presented in the report. So watch out for this publication!

Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX presents progress of the project at the Bibliothekartag 2012 in Hamburg

Those of you attending the German Bibliothekartag in Hamburg (22 – 25 May 2012) should be aware of an interesting session on research data management and add it to your personal conference program:

On May 24 there will be a session on “new structures and demands in scientific libraries – research data management in the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information.” In this session Goportis, the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information, is presenting some of its projects on RDM.

Read the rest of this entry »

Data Availability Policy: American Economic Review

As announced in my previous blogpost, I ‘m starting the presentation of some data availability policies and replication policies with the American Economic Review (AER). The AER is a flagship of the economic profession and one of the top ranked journals in this scientific discipline.
The AER was published in 1911 for the first time. Only 7 – 10 percent of the submissions are accepted and later on published.

The AER adopted a so called replication policy in 1986 – despite the fact that studies (for example by Dewald, Thursby and Anderson) already claimed, that a replication policy is not enough to promote replicable results.
In their policy, the Review pledged authors to provide datasets and code for processing the data to other scientists that are interested in replicating the results on request.

Replication policies have often failed, even if the corresponding author is willing to support other researchers…and I imagine that this szenario is not very common …After publishing an article, authors mostly don’t have incentives to prepare the data and code for other researchers. It costs time and the rewards the scientific system pays for sharing data often are marginal.

Read the rest of this entry »

RatSWD-Newsletter: EDaWaX Project introduced

The German Data Forum (RatSWD) has just published its current newsletter. Beside many other interesting articles, book reviews, event notes etc., on page 3 a description of the EDaWaX-Project is included (see below).

I’m sorry for our international visitors, but the article and the whole newsletter is available in German only.

Additionally I want to point the attention of our readers to another publication (in German) of the German Data Forum: Prof. Gerd G. Wagner and D. Huschka published a comment on the nature magazine’s special issue “data replication and reproducibility.”

You’ll find the working paper 194 “Datenverfügbarkeit reicht nicht, um Replikationsstudien zur Routine zu machen” in the Download section of this blog or on the website of the German Data Forum.

Read the rest of this entry »

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012!

As every year, the christmas tree in front of my office window reminds me that the year 2011 is going to end soon…it’s time to thank our project partners  for a successfull start of the project and a valuable cooperation. Furthermore, I want to thank all readers and commentators for your support in the last few months!

Since the start of the project to this day, 1000 readers visited our blog. In my eyes, this is a remarkable number for the two months and a few days since starting this. Thank you very much!

In the course of the next year we expect that even more people will visit us, because for 2012 we have a full agenda…

Read the rest of this entry »

Knowledge Exchange Meeting: EDaWaX Project presented!

Prof. Klaus Tochtermann, Director of the German National Library of Economics – Leibniz Information Center for Economics, gave a first presentation on the EDaWaX-Project.

Mr. Tochtermann gave the poster presentation in the course of the Knowledge Exchange Primary Data Workshop on Monday and Tuesday last week.

Knowledge Exchange is a co-operative effort that supports the use and development of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) infrastructure for higher education and research.

The Knowledge Exchange partners express a common vision based on four national strategies:

‘To make a layer of scholarly and scientific content openly available on the Internet.’

Read the rest of this entry »