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 »

EDaWaX: New Article published

Last year our project won the LIBER-Award for Library Innovation 2012. Now our paper was published in LIBER-Quarterly, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association of European Research Libaries.

Photo: “Tippen” by Jorma Bork / pixelio.de. License:>click<

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 »

GESIS publishes “Guidelines for the Management of Research Data – Social Sciences Survey Data”

GESIS – the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences has just released the technical report “Guidelines for the management of research data –  social sciences survey data.”

The report is available in German only, but the eighty pages thick document covers a lot of important topics:

Starting with some general recommendations for the exploration of the data available at an institution and issues of privacy protection and responsibility for research data, the report also provides a useful checklist for the management of research data in the first chapter.
Other chapters deal with organisational and technical aspects of data preparation and documentation (chapter 2) or organisational and technical issues of safeguarding data and documents (chapter 3).

Chapter 4 discusses metadata standards, focussing on DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) and persistent identificators (DOI -> da|ra, DataCite). Chapter 5 covers perpetual access to research data and some legal questions. The report concludes with an overview of the services GESIS provides for the management of research data, e.g. digital long-term preservation.

#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!

Data centres: their use, value and impact

This report provides an analysis of the usage and impact of a number of research data centres, representing a cross-section of research disciplines in the UK.

The study aimed to demonstrate the importance, relevance and benefits of effective sharing and curation of research data for the UK research community. It looked at the long-term usage and impact of data curated by a cross-disciplinary selection of established data centres.

Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, the study gathered evidence on the extent data centres have been useful to the research community. As part of a wider body of work, this evidence will help to build a case for improving data sharing practice in the UK.

The full report is available at the RIN website or here.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Project “Open Data and Publications” completed

The Project had the intention to support researchers to link their datasets to their corresponding publications. The library of Tilburg University want to use the experience gained by this project to offer a standard service for researchers.
In the course of the project sixty datasets were accessed and linked to publications.

To store the data, the project chose Dataverse; because dataverse offers institutions, research groups and individual researchers a simple way of archiving data and providing access to others.

For supporting the researchers procedures and guidelines were developed.

An (at least for me) surprising lesson learned by the project was that researches in fact want to make their supplementary research material available – if they are supported by library stuff. ODE stated, that it is an important task for libraries to describe and upload the materials to make it possible that datasets are linked to their publications and can be accessed by others.

As a consequence, a designated contact person for researchers and support should be nominated at Tillburg.

A useful (and maybe the only possible) way for linking data to publications – or just another difficult task for libraries to support unwilling researchers for providing at least a little of their data?

What do you think?

Drivers and barriers in data sharing [Update]

The ODE project has published a collection of success stories and lessons learned in the area of data sharing, re-use and preservation.

Ten stories have been selected from a series of interviewed carried out to establish a baseline for the drivers and barriers in data exchange.

You will find the full report here.

Update 25-10-2011:
Another report of the ODE project (“Integration of Data and Publications“) is related to the scientific communication and shows actual trends – e.g. it describes how libraries and publishers are dealing with research data and how they make them accessible.

One example: the report lists five abstract researcher requirements for integrating data and publication:

1. Researchers need somewhere to put data and make it safe for reuse
2. Researchers need to control its sharing and access
3. Researchers need the ability to integrate data and publication
4. Researchers need to get credit for data as a first class research object
5. Researchers need someone to pay for the costs of data availability and re-use

Quite interesting findings for our EDaWaX-Project- especially requirement 3 is a goal of our project…

An executive summary of the ODE-report is available here.

Image Source: Opportunities for Data Exchange – Project (ODE). Cover of the report: “Ten Tales of Drivers and Barriers in Data Sharing. Alliance for Permanent Access (APA). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/