Mendeley and labfolder join forces to improve data linking and exchange

Mendeley, a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers recently announced a collaboration with labfolder – a Berlin-based startup. labfolder is a digital lab notebook which helps scientists to keep their notes and data organized. The linking of these two tools allows the citation and embedding of scientific literature into experimental raw data, and the exporting and sharing of experiment descriptions in Mendeley.

For those interested in labfolder, I embedded the product video below. (Sorry for the advertising. I only mention the collaboration, because it shows that data availability and interlinking data and publications gets increasingly important)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S8OCIBAfbTE

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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Introducing the OJS-Dataverse Integration Project

Today I want to introduce the PKP- Open Journal System / Dataverse Integration Project to our readers, an approach that is in some parts quite similar to our own approach in the field of economics.

Funded by a $1 million Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, the OJS-DVN project intends to develop a plugin for journals that are using the Open Journal System (OJS), a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), to expand and improve access to research. Read the rest of this entry »

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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Journal in Neurosciences banned Supplementary Materials

Already a while ago, in fall 2010  the Journal of Neuroscience announced that it will stop hosting and peer-reviewing supplementary material for articles, so authors are no longer allowed to include any additional materials when they submit new manuscripts. A radical cut and a practice I haven’t heard of yet.

Despite the fact that this journal is neither part of our research sample for EDaWaX’s work package 2 nor in the scientific field of Economics it is worth to investigate the motivation for banning the supplements.
And of course it is interesting to notice what the journal proposes to do instead of hosting and peer-reviewing supplementary material. Read the rest of this entry »

DwB project invites researchers to apply for access to Secure Data Service

The Data without Boundaries  project (DwB) supports equal and easy access to official microdata for the European Research Area, within a structured framework where responsibilities and liability are equally shared.The project assumes that a comprehensive and easy-to-access research data infrastructure enables researchers to continuously produce cutting-edge research and reliable policy evaluations.

Especially the existing wealth of official microdata, currently under-used and held behind national, legislative, technical, and cultural borders is an important source for science and research. DwB claims that these borders  can be crossed over with cooperation and political will.

DwB contributes to the creating of an integrated model where the best solutions for access to official statistical microdata are available, irrespective of national boundaries, yet flexible enough to fit national arrangements.

DwB aims to enhance researchers’ transnational access to official micro data through coordination of existing infrastructures, as the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and the European Statistical System (ESS).

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