New KE-report: ‘The Evolving Landscape of Federated Research Data Infrastructures’

Knowledge Exchange, a consortium of six national organisations in Europe tasked with developing infrastructures and services to enable the use of digital technologies to improve higher education and research, has just a released a report on federated research data infrastructures.

In 2016, the Knowledge Exchange Research Data expert group identified a need for better understanding of the nature and consequences of research and data infrastructure being more and more federated. Work was designed to find answers to questions such as ‘Which are the main drivers for federating RD infrastructures and services ? What are the expected benefits? What are the consequences for research and researchers? What challenges and issues arise when making a federated research data infrastructure function well?’ Read the rest of this entry »

KE publishes recommendations for a Repository for Training Materials on RDM

Knowledge Exchange (KE) has recently released recommendations for a repository for training materials on research data management (RDM). Following a workshop of experts in February 2016 in London and the publication of a report called “Training for research data management: comparative European approaches”, the currently published report focusses on requirements for a repository on RDM training materials.

One of the practical outcomes of the workshop was that no international repository for information on training resources currently exists. To make existing nationally focused training material Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) an international initiative is needed to establish a repository or platform to deposit or link training materials on RDM. This would also help to train the urgently needed data stewards requested in the report ‘Realising the European Open Science Cloud’ by the High Level Expert Group on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Read the rest of this entry »

New KE report: Training for research data management: comparative European approaches

Knowledge Exchange (KE) has released a new report: “Training for research data management: comparative European approaches” is it called and it marks the preliminarly result of a longer time of discussions among several European stakeholders and communities.

At the end of 2015, KE initiated a project to compare approaches in research data management (RDM) training within the partnership’s five member countries. The project was structured around two strands of activity:

The group developed a survey to collect information on current practice around RDM training, in order to provide an overview of the RDM training landscape in several European countries. Subsequently, a workshop in February followed to share successful approaches to RDM training and capacity building provided within institutions and by infrastructure. Read the rest of this entry »

Knowledge Exchange: New Report on Research Software Sustainability published

Knowledge Exchange, a consortium of five national organisations within Europe tasked with developing infrastructure and services to enable the use
of digital technologies to improve higher education and research, has just a released another report on research software sustainability. The report is motivated by the importance of research software for the whole scientific process in every research discipline. The report argues:

“Without software, modern research would not be possible. Understandably, people tend to marvel at results rather than the tools used in their discovery, which means the fundamental role of software in research has been largely overlooked. But whether it is widely recognised or not, research is inexorably connected to the software that is used to generate results, and if we continue to overlook software we put at risk the reliability and reproducibility of the research itself.”

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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 »

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 »

Knowledge Exchange released Discussion paper on Open Knowledge

Knowledge Exchange (KE) – a cooperation of five national funding organisations (DFG, Surf, DEFF, CSC and JISC) – has been founded in 2005 to improve the digital infrastructure for information and communication technology as it relates to the research and university library sectors. Since 2005 KE is very active in multiple areas. These areas are clearly intended to encourage open access to the tools of science and scholarship for the higher education and research communities. They also contribute toward building an integrated e-infrastructure and exploring new developments in the future of publishing. There is a specific focus is on the development of storage, accessibility and quality assurance of digitally published research data. Another area of activity is directed at exploring effective investment in research tools (like interoperability standards; research data; research tools and sustainable business models for Open Access. Read the rest of this entry »

New Knowledge Exchange Publication: “The Value of Research Data”

Last week I’ve been in Berlin and took part in the workshop “Making Data Count: Research data availability and research assessment” hosted by Knowledge Exchange (KE), a 2005 established cooperation between five research funders.

The aim of the workshop was to bring experts and stakeholders from research institutions, universities, scholarly societies and funding agencies together in order to review, discuss and build on possibilities to implement the culture of sharing and to integrate publication of data into research assessment procedures. Read the rest of this entry »

“A Surfboard for Riding the Wave”: KE action plan on research data presented

Following the report “Riding the Wave: How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data” that was released 2010 by the high level expert group on research data, the Knowledge Exchange (KE) partners have embraced this vision and commissioned a report that translates Riding the Wave into actions for the four partner countries and beyond.

The report was presented today during a KE workshop in Bonn.

The Report “A Surfboard for Riding the Wave” builds on the 2010 report and presents an overview of the present situation with regard to research data in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and offers broad outlines for a possible action programme for the four countries in realising the envisaged collaborative data infrastructure.

While the 2010 report of the high level expert group on research data presented a vision for the year 2030, the report of KE concretizes this vision for the four countries.

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Report: Legal Status of Research Data in four european countries

It is difficult for researchers and those supporting them to understand how open access to research data can be legally obtained and re-used. This is due to the fact that European and national laws vary and researchers work across national boundaries.

A possible approach to providing clarity would be that researchers assign a licence to their data. This practice could be incorporated in a code of conduct for researchers.
The report ‘The legal status of research data in the Knowledge Exchange partner countries’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE) and written by the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER). The aim of the report was to provide clarity by analysing the intellectual property regimes in the four KE countries and European database law.

Moreover, the report provides three recommendations to achieve better access: making contractual arrangements with authors, harmonisation of European copyright law and setting up of policies on commercial interests.

You’ll find the full report here. The the four national reports are available here.

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