RDA invites applications for RDA fellowship

The RDA (Research Data Alliance)/US Fellows Program engages early career scholars and professionals in the pragmatic, real-world challenges that are encountered in reducing the technical and social barriers to global data sharing. RDA/US Fellows receive travel funding to observe, learn, be ambassadors of RDA, and contribute to the overall bold mission of the Research Data Alliance. Fellows will be funded to attend three consecutive plenaries (18 months) to carry out a topic of research, outreach, or education of their proposing. Application is accepted until 20 July 2014. More information is available from here.

Case Studies on Research Data Management in Libraries

LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) ’s Steering Committee on Scholarly Communication and Research Infrastructures has collected case studies, hosted by or with strong involvement of libraries in research data management. These studies describe policies and strategies that pave the way for the creation, institutional integration and the running of support services and underlying infrastructures. In addition, challenges and lessons learned are described, and ways-forward outlined.

The 11 case studies can be accessed here.

RIOXX 2.0 Metadata and Guidelines Released for Public Comment

A beta version of RIOXX 2.0 is released for public comment. RIOXX 2.0 has been developed by EDINA and Chygrove Ltd, with significant input from RCUK. This work is endorsed by RCUK and HEFCE and has been funded and facilitated by Jisc.

Although this project and the software development particularly focus on institutional repositories in UK to comply with open access reporting mandates from RCUK, one particularly interesting and insightful aspect of this is the process during which metadata guidelines for Open Access repositories are being developed and consolidated.

New Guide Released: Sharing Survey Data

The UK Data Service has released a new guide Depositing Shareable Survey Data. 

This 16-page handbook, developed by a specialist team at the UK Data Service with extensive input from UK government departments, academic survey owners and survey producers, will take you through the full data journey, from fieldwork planning to eventual user access. While the guide is specifically developed to support new depositors of large-scale surveys, the principles apply to a wide range of significant data deposits.

The Power of Data Sharing | ANDS Newsletter

The latest newsletter (July 2014, issue 19) published by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) covers a variety of topics including data storage, data sharing, particularly sharing sensitive data, etc. What follows a series of short articles is a list of forthcoming events (webinars) that you may also find useful. The speaker of the next webinar on July 3, 2014 is Dr Virginia Barbour who will present on “PLOS: open data, ORCIDs and Article Level Metrics”

You can find more details in the ANDS newsletter: http://ands.org.au/newsletters/newsletter-2014-07.pdf

 

Research Data Curation Bibliography

Charles Bailey has announced that Version 4 of the Research Data Curation Bibliography has been released. This selective bibliography includes over 320 English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions. Most sources have been published from January 2009 through June 2014; however, a limited number of earlier key sources are also included.

Research Data Curation Bibliography: The http://digital-scholarship.org/rdcb/rdcb.htm

 

What Is Text and Data Mining?

Text mining is an interdisciplinary field combining techniques from linguistics, computer science and statistics to build tools that can efficiently retrieve and extract information from digital text (see PLOS blog: Announcing the PLOS Text Mining Collection, April 17, 2013). For instance, it uses powerful computers to find links between drugs and side effects, or genes and diseases, that are hidden within the vast scientific literature. These are discoveries that a person scouring trough papers one by one may never notice. Interest in text and data mining scholarly content is on the increase. For those who want to learn more about text and data mining, a webinar recording of the CrossRef Text and Data Mining (from June 3, 2014) may be of interest.

Reproducibility? It’s Still a Challenge

Some scientific research are inherently easier (or harder) to reproduce others. A recent blog post by Rich FitzJohn, Matt Pennell, Amy Zanne and Will Cornwell at rOpenSci. The level of reproducibility depends upon the set of tools available to researchers, for instance, open source software, cloud computing, data archiving, standardized biological materials, and widely available computing resources. Authors also discuss two parts of the reproducibility, the data and the analysis, as well as associated challenges.

PLOS Data Policy Update Part 2

In the latest issue of College & Research Libraries News (vol. 75 no. 6 305-308), Emma Ganley, an acting deputy editor of PLOS Biology, provides a summary of the implementation of the PLOS data policy and researchers’ different responses. As many of you know, reception of the PLOS Data Policy by the scientific community was initially polarized. You may find this short article informative to learn more about the PLOS Data Policy which is hoped to serve as a catalyst for change and invigorate the development of new resources and infrastructure for research and access.

PLOS Data Policy Update

It has been a few months since the PLOS journals’ data policy was implemented. For the re-use and re-purpose of data by readers and by data miners, authors of new manuscripts were required to submit a statement about where the data underlying their description of research can be found. As of today,16,000 sets of authors have included information about data availability with their article submission. Should this number be considered as good news for open science, and more specifically, is this a step towards improved integration between the published literature and the data underlying it? You can learn more about the recent update from the PLOS’ data policy and current state of data sharing by authors from here.