Save the date: Workshop “Open data, restricted data and the role of libraries”

NEREUS – a network of European libraries in Economics and Social Sciences –  is happy to announce a pre-conference workshop (2015-6-23 in London) at this year’s LIBER-Conference.

Open Science and open data have become hot topics in recent years. Effective research data management is more and more postulated by research funders. Research infrastructure providers worldwide are busy building up various services and tools for researchers to support them within their research and the management of research data. But how successful are these approaches and their impact in supporting research? How open could or should data be and which role(s) libraries can play to support researchers effectively? Read the rest of this entry »

Paper on the Incentives for Academic Data Sharing published: „What Drives Academic Sharing?“

Benedikt Fecher, Sascha Friesike, and Marcel Hebing have published another paper presenting further results of their study concerning academic data sharing. Since data sharing enables researchers to verify results and to pursuit new research questions with “old” data, it is of particular importance for scientific progress.

Fecher, Friesike, and Hebing conducted a systematic review of 98 scholarly papers as well as an empirical survey among 603 secondary data users. In order to explain the data sharing process from the primary researcher’s point of view, the authors introduce a conceptual framework based on the analyses. They divide the data sharing process into six descriptive categories: data donor, research organization, research community, norms, data infrastructure, and data recipients. Read the rest of this entry »

New Working Paper on Data Sharing Practises published: “A Reputation Economy”

Academic data sharing is a way for researchers to collaborate and thereby meet the needs of an increasingly complex research landscape. It enables researchers to verify results and to pursuit new research questions with “old” data.

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It is therefore not surprising that data sharing is advocated by funding agencies, journals and researchers alike. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Access to Research Data: Strategic Delay and the Ambiguous Welfare Effects of Mandatory Data Disclosure

Patrick Andreoli-Versbach and Frank Mueller-Langer (two economists from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich) have published a paper on strategic delay and the ambiguous welfare effects of mandatory data disclosure (2014).

By setting up a model describing the incentives of a researcher to share self-generated data with the research community in the context of a published article, they found that these incentives can be distorted by a policy they call “First Paper Policy” (requires authors to share their data immediately after the first publication): Read the rest of this entry »

EDaWaX-Study on Data Policies of Journals in Economics and Business Studies (Part I)

One work package (WP2) of EDaWaX’s second funding phase deals with a broader analysis and comparison of journals’ data policies in economics and business studies. In the project’s first funding phase we already have conducted a similar survey, but it primarily focused on journals in economics.

Because research data and methodology in business studies are not necessarily identical to those employed in economics, we found it to be important to compare journals’ data policies of both branches of economic research. Read the rest of this entry »

Report of the 1st national RDA Germany Meeting is online

On November 20/21 the first national RDA Meeting Germany was held in Potsdam. More than 100 participants followed the presentations and discussions. One aim of the meeting was to inform interested people and institutions about RDA’s activities.

On the first day of the conference there were many presentations to inform about the results RDA has yet archived as well as the governance structure that has been defined for RDA. In addition, some perspectives for the future work of the RDA-IGs and WGs have been discussed. Read the rest of this entry »

New KE-Publication: “Sowing the seed” #Update

A few days ago,  Knowledge Exchange (KE) – a cooperation of five national funding organisations (DFG, Surf, DEFF, CSC and JISC) – has just released a new publication, titled “Sowing the seed: Incentives and motivations for sharing research data, a researchers’ perspective.”

This qualitative study has gathered evidence, examples and opinions on current and future incentives for research data sharing from the researchers’ point of view, in order to provide recommendations for policy and practice development on how best to incentivize data access and re-use.

Incentives and motivations ask for development of a data infrastructure with rich context where research data, papers and other outputs or resources are jointly available within a single data resource. Different types of data sharing and research disciplines need to be acknowledged. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Access to Data: An Ideal Professed but not Practised

The two economists Patrick Andreoli-Versbach and Frank Mueller-Langer (both from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich) have published a new paper in Research Policy in which they analyse the data-sharing behaviour of 488 randomly selected empirical researchers.*

Andreoli-Versbach and Mueller-Langer (2014) provide evidence that most researchers in economics and management do not share their data voluntarily. The authors Read the rest of this entry »

Biomedical Sciences: Journals unite to forster reproducible research

When it comes to the topic of replication, it always is a good idea to consult the webpages of the nature journal. Yesterday, for instance, the journal reported that a group of editors representing more than 30 major journals, representatives from funding agencies as well as scientific leaders discussed principles and guidelines for preclinical biomedical research in June 2014.

The gathering was convened by the US National Institutes of Health, Nature and Science.

The attendees agreed on a common set of principles and guidelines in reporting preclinical research that list proposed journal policies and author reporting requirements in order to promote transparency and reproducibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Science established “Statistical Board of Reviewing Editors” to investigate data

In order to provide better oversight of the interpretation of observational data handed in to the journal along with manuscripts, Science established the Statistical Board of Reviewing Editors (SBoRE), which started working on 1^st July, 2014.

The board consists of experts in various aspects of statistics and data analysis. Their task is to investigate manuscripts, in order to identify issues which need screening, and to suggest experts from the statistics community to examine that data. Editors, BoRE members (members of the BoRE – Board of Reviewing Editors – conduct a rapid quality check of the manuscripts and propose which of them should be reviewed by technical specialists), and reviewers can decide which manuscripts need additional examination of the data analysis or statistical treatment, which will then be handed in to the SBoRE. Read the rest of this entry »

PLOS, CDL, and DataONE join forces to build incentives for data sharing

The open access publisher PLOS (Public Library of Science), the University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library, and DataONE  announced the launch of a new project to develop data-level metrics. The project, titled “Making Data Count: Developing a Data Metrics Pilot” is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US. The project will result in a suite of metrics that track and measure data use.

The need for such a data metrics pilot is obvious: Sharing data is time consuming and researchers need incentives for undertaking the extra work. Metrics for data will provide feedback on data usage, views, and impact that will help encourage researchers to share their data. This project will explore and test the metrics needed to capture activity surrounding research data. Read the rest of this entry »

Guidebook “Discover-Cite-Document: Research Data in the Social Sciences and Economics” published

After almost eight months of intense collaborative work, we are happy to announce the release of a guidebook on research data in the social sciences and economics. The idea of writing the guidebook was born in the course of a panel session on last year’s annual meeting of the “Verein für Socialpolitik” (VfS), the largest German-speaking economists association, where Jutta Günther (Halle Institute for Economic Research), Klaus Tochtermann (ZBW), Gert G. Wagner (German Data Forum and DIW Berlin) and Stefan Winkler-Nees (German Research Foundation) discussed both the potential and the need of data sharing in applied economics.

The panellists assessed that there currently is a lack of information on data documentation and citation in academic education.

Consequently, together with our partners from DIW Berlin, GESIS and the German Data Forum, we started to gather information on these topics. One year after the initial panel discussion, the hot off the press booklet was presented at this year’s annual meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik two weeks ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

New release of Research Data MANTRA (Management Training)

The Research Data MANTRA course is an open, online training course that provides instruction in good practice in research data management. There are eight interactive learning units on key topics such as data management planning, organising and formatting data, using shared data and licensing your own data, as well as four data handling tutorials with open datasets for use in R, SPSS, NVivo and ArcGIS.
This fourth release of MANTRA has been revised and systematically updated with new content, videos, reading lists, and interactive quizzes. Three of the data handling tutorials have been rewritten and tested for newer software versions too. Read the rest of this entry »

Do open access articles in economics have a citation advantage?

The two economists Klaus Wohlrabe and Daniel Birkmaier (both from the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich) have published a new working paper in which they analyse the impact of open access publishing in economics on citations.

Their sample consists of articles from 2005 from 13 economic journals (including the top five journals). In addition to standard mean comparisons Wohlrabe and Birkmaier also use a negative-binomial regression model with several covariates to control for potential selection effects and quality bias. For their analysis they used citation data from three different databases, namely the Web of Science, RePEc and Google Scholar.

The results they retrieved are very interisting and might light the debate on open access publishing in academia.

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EDaWaX receives two more years of funding!

We are very happy to announce that our research funding organisation, the German Research Foundation (DFG), has granted another two years of funding for our project.

In their final report, based on the good results of the project’s first funding phase, the reviewers concluded that EDaWaX’s planning for expanding the pilot application and for undertaking a detailed analysis of journals in business studies should be supported with “high”, respectively “highest priority.” Read the rest of this entry »