ICPSR and Elsevier announce data linking

As announced a few days ago, over 400 Elsevier journals will offer direct linking options with datasets in ICPSR. ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data – in total more than 500,000 files. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism and other fields.

These datasets become discoverable through corresponding research articles on ScienceDirect, a website operated by the Anglo-Dutch publisher Elsevier. This allows researchers to access underlying research data immediately while reading the research paper, and potentially reuse the data for their own research. Vice versa, research articles on ScienceDirect can also be accessed directly from within the ICPSR datasets providing additional information to place the data into context. An example is available here. Read the rest of this entry »

Documentation of EDaWaX’s CKAN-Application: First draft available

One of the primary objectives of the EDaWaX-project is the development of a software application which intends to facilitate the management of research data for journals in the social sciences (and especially for those in economics and business studies).

The software application is approaching its public release at the end of the current funding term in late April. But we are already very far with the software’s developement. For those of you who can’t await the public release, we have just published a very first draft version (Version 0.1) of the application’s documentation. Even though there are still some parts of the functionalities that are not yet covered by the documentation, interested readers and researchers can get a picture of the application’s functionalities and features.

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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.

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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.

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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 »

Contemporary, useful and subject-based: The replication network

Today I would like to introduce the replication network (TRN) to our readers, a network whose purpose is “to encourage economists and their journals to publish replications.” This is all along in line with the purpose of our own project.

The website of the replication network serves as a channel of communication to both update scholars about the state of replications in economics and to establish a network for the sharing  of information and ideas among economists. It offers important information on the possibility to publish replication studies in economics journals and provides lists of publications dealing with the topic of replications in economic research. Also a list of published replication studies is available. Read the rest of this entry »

New working paper: “Is Economics Research Replicable?”

Andrew Chang and Phillip Li, two researchers working at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency/U.S. Department of the Treasury, attempt to replicate 67 papers published in 13 well-regarded economics journals (American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Review, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings (P&P), Canadian Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Economic Journal, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Dynamics, Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Quarterly Journal of Economics), using author-provided replication files that include both data and code.

Some journals in the sample of Chang and Li require data and code replication files, and other journals do not require such files. Aside from 6 papers that use confidential data, they obtain data and code replication files for at least 29 of 35 papers (83%) that are required to provide such files as a condition of publication, compared to 11 of 26 papers (42%) that are not required to provide data and code replication files. Read the rest of this entry »

New KE-Report: Researcher identifiers – National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation

Knowledge Exchange (KE) – a collaboration between five national organisations, DFG – the German Research Foundation, JISC , DEFF – Denmark’s Electronic Research Library, SURF – the ICT organisation for Dutch higher education and research and CSC – the IT Centre for Science in Finland- has just released a new report on research identifiers.

In June 2015, KE brought together representatives from its five member countries for a Knowledge Exchange Workshop on National approaches to ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) and ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) implementation. The aim of the workshop was to share national perspectives on ORCID and ISNI, including the challenges, solutions and lessons learned with regards to implementation of ORCID and ISNI on a national scale. Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX: New research paper published

We are happpy to announce that our new peer-reviewed research paper “Data Policies and Data Archives: A New Paradigm for Academic Publishing in Economic Sciences?” has just been published in the Conference Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB15). The paper summarises some results of a broader analyses on data policies of journals in economics and business studies.

In our paper we summarise the findings of an empirical study in which a sample of 346 journals in economics and business studies were examined. We regard both the extent and the quality of journals’ data policies, which should facilitate replications of published empirical research. The paper presents some characteristics of journals equipped with data policies and gives some recommendations for suitable data policies in economics and business sciences journals. In addition, we also evaluate the journals’ data archives to roughly estimate whether these journals really enforce data availability. Our key finding is that we are currently not able to determine a new publishing paradigm for journals in economic sciences.

I would like to thank the reviewers and the organisers of the conference for their useful comments! The full paper is available here.

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Busy months before summer holidays

It is vacation season and like many others, also some of the people working for the EDaWaX-project enjoy their well-earned summer holidays. Before I also leave the office, I would like to jump on the chance to report on the progress of our project for the last 6 months or so.

It has been a quite busy time for most of us and we achieved progress in many of our work packages. The main focus has been on advancing the technical work packages, but we were also able to finalise two work packages of the project’s analyses phase.

Let me go into detail: Read the rest of this entry »

Wiley partners with Figshare to enable data sharing

At the end of June, Figshare (an online digital repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos) announced a partnership with the publishing house Wiley to support authors who wish to openly share their data.

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Action Poll- tools for working with research data

You are a researcher and you are working with data? Great!

This short, anonymous poll- targeted at researchers- aims to characterise the range of research data management tools that are used across domains and regions. It is being conducted by Research Data Alliance (RDA) Long Tail of Research Data Interest Group.

The results will be reported at the next RDA meeting in Paris in September 2015 and also made available through the Long Tail Interest Group webpage.

The poll will be open from June 15 to July 31, 2015 and is available on https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TVQ7RY6.

 It is only one-page long and will take less that 5 minutes to complete.

For more information, please contact: Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR Read the rest of this entry »

Article: The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research

In 2012, an estimated 114.8 billion $ in the US were spent on life sciences research. Roughly half of it is spent on preclinical research, with government sources providing the majority of funding – approximatly 38 billion US$.

Now, three researchers calculate the costs of irreproducible research in preclinical research near 28 billion $ – only for the United States alone. That is the conclusion of a study published in PLoS Biology a few days ago.

In the opinion of the study’s authors, the giant amount of 28 billion $ accumulates, because low reproducibility rates within life science research undermine cumulative knowledge production and contribute to both delays and costs of therapeutic drug development.

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German Council of Science and Humanities publishes Recommendations on Scientific Integrity

Yesterday, the German council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) published a 54-page position paper on scientific integrity (unfortunately in German only). In a press release the scientific body stated:

“Prosperity and development of modern societies today depend to a large extent on the quality and progress of scientific knowledge. Therefore it is important that the public can trust in the ethical and quality standards of the scientific community. Cases of fraud and misconduct – particularly major fraud and plagiarism scandals – undermine that trust. In response to such cases of fraud and loss of confidence many scientific organisations have published rules and guidelines dedicated to a Good Scientific Practice in the last few years. The German council of Science and Humanities now has adopted a position paper and recommendations on scientific integrity.” Read the rest of this entry »

“Research Data at your Fingertips”: German Priority Initiative ‘Digital Information’ publishes Position Paper

 The Priority Initiative Digital Information of the Alliance of German Science Organisations has published a position paper on research data and research data infrastructures in February.

At the beginning the four page long paper sketches a short vision on how researchers will be able to work with research data in the year 2025. A “quick and easy access to all research data” is part of this vision, also the important task to credit researchers for sharing their research data is mentioned by the authors: “The publication of research data and software enhances the academic reputation.”

The second chapter of the paper deals with the current challenges in managing research data. Especially the situation in organisational structures, different research disciplines, publicly funded information institutions and research organisations is described. Read the rest of this entry »