OECD publishes new guidelines on research ethics & new forms of data

The variety and volume of the New Forms of Data that are available with potential to inform research
in the social sciences is rapidly expanding. Much of this falls in the category of ‘Big Data’ which are
characterised by their size and complexity and the fact that they are often not amenable to the more
traditional forms of statistical analysis used in social science research.

New kinds of data are rapidly becoming available in massive quantities, providing a record of the transactions we carry out, the communications we make and other social and economic activities. These data offer significant potential for research in the social sciences and beyond, with the possibility of new insights and benefits to society, health and the economy. Although these new forms of data provide exciting possibilities for future research, using them also presents ethical and practical challenges  – the risk of disclosure of identities, the ethics of using such data in research and reputational risks for organisations collecting or creating data.

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Open Economics Working Group: Many activities in the last weeks

Despite rising temperatures and beginning summer holidays all across Europe, the Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation was very active within the last weeks. I would like to single out a few of these activities:

• On June 11-12 the Second Open Economics International Workshop took place. This second of two international workshops funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, aimed at bringing together economists and senior academics, funders, data publishers and data curators in order to discuss the progress made in the field of open data for economics and the still existing challenges. The topics and the programme were very interesting – and so is the recap of the event, written by Velichka Dimitrova, coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. One of our project partners, Prof. Dr. Gert G. Wagner, chairman of the German Data Forum (RatSWD), also took part and  gave a lecutre on “the culture of data sharing in economics.” 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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#rdtk_herts: First Project Report available

The first monthly progress report of the project ‘Service Oriented Toolkit for Research Data Management‘ (aka #rdtk_herts) is available on the project website.

The ‘Service Oriented Toolkit for Research Data Management‘ project, is running at University of Hertfordshire from October 2011 until March 2013.

The site also contains a brief introduction to the Toolkit and an article pointing to University of Hertfordshire’s data management policy, which the Toolkit seeks to enable.
University of Hertfordshire published new policy and guidelines for staff with regard to Data Management on September 1, 2011. Most of the policy and its appendices are available publicly on the University’s Policy and Regulation web site under Data Management Policy.

The most useful part of the policy for Researchers is the appendix: Guide to Research Data Management . This contains a checklist of questions, the answers to which lead to the formation of a good practice Data Management Plan and also facilitate the responses likely to be required by external funding bodies.

The production of further guidance and demonstration of commoditised services is one of the purposes of the Research Data Toolkit project, thereby helping researchers to ‘tick off’ their checklist, create successful bids, and establish and cement good data management.

The project team welcomes feedback and information from members of the Research Data Management community!

Mantra Project launches online training courses for RDM

The MANTRA project has just pubished an online training course to help disseminate good practise in research data management at the University of Edinburgh and beyond.

The online training course provides guidelines for the management of research data focussing on key concepts of data management. In addition practical exercices in handling data which learners can download and work trough at their own place are provided.

The Data Library team at EDINA produced the materials over the course of the past year as part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme.