European Commission held public Consultation on Open Research Data

The European Commission (EC) held a public consultation on open research data. For that purpose the Commission invited stakeholders from various branches and researchers, the industry, funders, libraries, publishers, infrastructure developers and other stakeholders joined the meeting on 2 July in Brussels.

The commission posed five questions to structure the debate. These questions included basic questions like “how research data can be defined?”. But a lion’s share of the questions dealt with the “openness” of data: What types of data should be openly available? When and how does openness need to be limited?

In addition other important questions from the perspective of infrastructure service providers were mentioned. How should research data be stored and made accessible? How should the issue of data re-use be addressed? And finally a question I personally characterize as a very important topic: How can we enhance data awareness and a culture of data sharing?

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Press release: Panel of experts recommends integration of research data management into universitie’s curricula

Experts say research data management should be an integral part of university curricula

Panel of experts recommends the integration of research data management into the university curricula of young researchers. The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the German Data Forum initiated a debate on the topic at the annual meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik, the most prestigious professional association of German-speaking economists, held in Düsseldorf from 4 to 7 September 2013. 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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US: “Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research” – new White House Directive mandates OA

John Paul Holdren, a chief advisor of US-President Obama on science and technology issues, has issued a memorandum  that directs those agencies with more than $100 million in research and development expeditures…

“…to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.”

According to Holdren the directive is well-balanced:

“We wanted to strike the balance between the extraordinary public benefit of increasing public access to the results of federally-funded scientific research and the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost.”

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New DCC Resource: Disciplinary Metadata

All people dealing with research data management quickly learn that good metadata is key for research data access and re-use.

Now Elizabeth Bedford from DCC, the Digital Curation Centre in UK, collected a lot of information about disciplinary metadata standards, including profiles, tools to implement the standards and use cases of data repositories currently implementing them.

The ressource can be searches by discipline (biology, earth science, physical science, social sciences and humanities and general research data) or by resource type (metadata standards, profiles and extensions, use cases, tools).

Everyone dealing with RDM should have a look at that page – I think it is a very good ressource and provides a valueable  overview of disciplinary metadata standards.

Picture: cea. /  flickr.com

Results of the EDaWaX Online Survey on Hosting Options for publication-related Research Data

In October and November 2012 our project started an online-survey among national and international research data centres, archives, library networks and libraries. The aim of our survey was to evaluate the opportunities to store and host a publication-related research data archive in the above mentioned organisations.
In our opinion in particular research data centres, but also archives and libraries are very well qualified to take care of these data.
In our survey we checked the general possiblity to host and store different types of research data.

Now we completed our analyses. The results we obtained are listed below.

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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.
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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:

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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.

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Psychology: The Rise of false-positive Findings

In the November 2011 Issue of Psychological Science, Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn published an interesting article about the undisclosed flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting that leads to an increase of actual false-positive rates in psychology. The researchers stated that it is unacceptably easy to publish “statistically significant” evidence consistent with any hypothesis.

The major problem they found is what they call the “researcher degrees of freedom” – or to be more correct: the decisions researchers making within a research process: e.g. what observations should be included or rejected? How much data should be collected? Which control variables should be used?

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The Social Life of Data

Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, addresses in his blogpost some interesting questions and positions related to open data:

First he states that access to and use of data may be shaped as much by social conventions as by available technology.

He quotes a report published by NESTA and RIN to illustrate what he means:

“Cultures vary in different disciplines, which can itself cause difficulties in cross-disciplinary work; but researchers are typically both co-operative and competitive. The key currency for securing competitive career rewards is publication of articles, conference papers and monographs; and many researchers regard the data and other resources that they create in the course of their research as their intellectual capital which they wish to exploit and mine in order to produce new publications over an extended period. Some researchers fear that openness involves a loss of control, and a risk of being scooped by others”.

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Reference Book “Research Data Management” published

In the course of Frankfurt Book Fair, a new reference book for reasearch data managenent was announced.

The reference book,  published by Prof. Büttner, Prof. Hobohm (both FH Potsdam) and Lars Müller, gains insights in the management of research data in different scientific communities.

Beside other topics the reference book deals with the lifecycle of research data, data policies, judical subjects, metadata and standards, repositories for research data, digital preservation and the  publishing of data.

The refence book is published by Bock and Herchen and additionally is available as open acess publication.

You can download the reference book here.