Public Comment on Access to Federally Supported Research and Development Data and Publications

In response to both the recent OSTP memorandum and the proposed bill (FASTR) that call for increased public access to data and publications resulting from federally funded research, a group of cooperating agencies and the National Research Council have organized two planning meetings held May 14-17 to gather stakeholder input (also included are "brief introductory addresses by a select few experts and summarizing commentary by equally few rapporteurs").

Two meetings will be held, one focused on publications (May 14-15) and the other on data (May 16-17). The public is invited to attend in person (at the National Academy of Sciences in DC) or via webcast, but registration is required. Attendees may also request time to present a verbal or written statement.

Sponsoring Agencies:
Department of Agriculture
Department of Commerce
National Institute of Standards and Technology
National Technical Information Service
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Department of Defense
Department of Education
Department of Energy
Department of Health and Human Services
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Department of the Interior
United States Geological Survey
Department of Transportation
Environmental Protection Agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
National Endowment for the Humanities
National Science Foundation
Smithsonian Institution

Thomson Reuters' Web of Science Presents: The Data Citation Index!

Last October, Web of Science (WoS) launched a new service known as the Data Citation Index (DCI). It allows users to track and discover data from tons of research projects. The DCI covers info for datasets from multidisciplinary and international repositories, and is housed within the WoS we already know and love. Researchers comfortable looking up papers in WoS can find related datasets, or vice versa. Collocating research data and papers is great step toward making datasets more discoverable.

Data discoverability through the DCI is good for researchers and librarians. Tracking citations of datasets gives researchers better and more consistent context of work relevant to their own. That enlarges their scope of understanding, reach of influence, and reduces the chances of performing redundant research. By tossing tons of data citations in together, the DCI also creates a context of metadata and attribution facets used for datasets. That helps data librarians create better data management plans for their repositories.

Citation tracking is a great thing for data management, but some crinkles still need to be smoothed out. An evaluative report by the University of Minnesota on their trial of the DCI highlighted some pros and cons. The metadata for different but apparently similar datasets contained equally ambiguous terms, for example. That musses up the sense of proper context and standardization the DCI intends to provide. Datasets themselves, however, are eminently discoverable thanks to WoS’s preexisting search and results refinement functions.

The DCI is notable step for data management and exposes some of its major challenges, such as: reining in variation between metadata, aggregating interdisciplinary repositories, and discoverability.

Guest Bloggers

You will see a few new names attached to the blog posts in the near future.  Jenny and I have opened up blog posts to interested bloggers from the University of Washington iSchool.  The first such post will be by Tal Noznisky posting a review on the Data Citation Index by Thomson Reuters.  Welcome, Tal!

Global Health Data Exchange Updates

The Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx) has announced a relaunch with enhanced navigation and additional features, including improved navigation, background information on countries, data series, and organizations. The advanced search allows users to search specific queries by geography, time, data type, keyword, and data source. Data can also be sorted on whether the actual research data is publicly and freely available. An announcement about the new features in version 2 is available online.

In addition, search results can now be sorted by the year that data collection started, and can be easily exported. Geographies now have a time component to reflect historical changes to country names or boundaries over (e.g., the Soviet Union).

Launched in March 2011 by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, the GHDx is the world’s largest catalog and repository of health-related data. It currently contains more than 8000 records with carefully researched information about data, including a standardized English title, local-language title, geography and time covered by the data, a suggested citation and information about current data providers. In addition, detailed keywords provide information about the topics that are covered by the data. Many datasets can be downloaded directly from the GHDx.

The Library "Reboot" in Nature

The current issue of Nature (Volume 495 Number 7442) is focused on changes in publishing; one article in particular highlights some of the current challenges to academic libraries, and what some organizations are doing to both remain at the University's core of research, as well as transform the way they deliver and store information.

"Publishing Frontiers: The Library Reboot" shares examples from some US, Australian and UK libraries. It covers how some libraries are focused on offering non-traditional ways to use and visualize the data and information housed by the library. It also discusses research data management, and how many libraries around the world either have or are planning to offer RDM to their campuses, in part as an extension of the information storage and retrieval that libraries have always been doing, and in part to stay central to the academic research mission. “I see us moving up the food chain and being co-contributors to the creation of new knowledge,” says Sarah Thomas, the head of libraries at the University of Oxford, UK.

The New OSTP Policy and Data

The OSTP policy changes last month that mandate greater access to federally funded research left us wondering what, exactly, it'll mean for federally funded research data. There have been several good blog posts written that summarize what the policy states and an interpretation of what the changes might mean in the realm of data.

The Scholarly Kitchen gives a history of how the policy came to be, deciphers what it means, and provides a list of agencies covered (NIH, CDC, FDA, ARHQ, NSF, NASA, DOE, USDA, FAA, FHWA, NIST, NOAA, USGS, EPA, DOD, VA, USAID, Dept. of Education, and the Smithsonian), and some first impressions of what it means for public access to funded research papers.

Carly Strasser from California Digital Library takes a look at the policy from both a scholarly article and data perspective, providing a short-and-sweet summary in plain English about potential changes from the policy.

And last, Kristin Briney spends time looking at what the policy means for data in particular.

Basically, what all this means is that data management plans will now be required of researchers on federal grants, and these plans should be supported by the various agencies. There is no particular mandate for sharing, just the "maximizing of access to research data." There is a lot of potential there for increases in data management plan creation and support, open repositories and greater access to the content therein. Agencies have 6 months from the announcement to create a policy; come August, there will be some interesting things to discuss.

DataONE Summer Internship Program

Data folks interested in spending part of their summer working on intensive data-and-science-related topics can now apply for one of eight open DataONE internship positions. The internships are available to undergraduates, graduates and post-graduates who have received their masters in the last five years, and there are no restrictions on field of study as long as prospective intern's qualifications and interests match a project. Each intern will be paired with a mentor, who does not have to be in the same location or institution. 2013 project titles include:

- Next Generation Data Environment: Semantically-Enabling the DataONE Metadata Environment
- Ontology Mappings in the Earth and Environmental Sciences
- Evaluation of Ontology Coverage for Curation
- Integrating Data Stories into DataONE Education and Community Engagement Products
- Data Policies for Public Participation in Scientific Research
- Bi-level Metadata Registry Development
- PBase: Provenance as a First-class Citizen in DataONE
- Build Fundamental Components for Provenance-aware Model Exploration, Evaluation, and Benchmarking Cyber-infrastructure Prototype
- A Visualization Tool for Provenance in DataONE

More detail about these topics and the internships is available at www.dataone.org/internships.

Application deadline is March 17th 2013. The internship runs from May 27 - July 26 and interns will receive a stipend of $5,000.

The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is "a virtual organization dedicated to providing open, persistent, robust, and secure access to biodiversity and environmental data, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation."

Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Discovering Research Data Online

On Tuesday February 26 (that's tomorrow, folks!) from 3-5:30PM EST/12-2:30PST, the Board on Research Data and Information will be hosting a symposium called "Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Discovering Research Data Online." As research becomes more data intensive and the amount of data produced continues to grow, knowing how to find relevant data is increasing in importance. Acknowledging the variety of solutions in use for storing and locating data, the symposium will also be looking at the issues of "pervasive infrastructure, standardization of approaches, and the usual questions of who does what, where, and how?" Speakers will include Clifford Lynch from CNI and Francine Berman from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The 2.5 hour discussion will be audiocast live; the address will be posted at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/ about an hour before the event.

Digital Curation Conference videos online

For those of us who weren't in Amsterdam last month for the 8th International Digital Curation Conference, video for many of the presentations has been posted online: 

Included is UW's Stephanie Wright participating in a panel, "What is a Data Scientist?" She spoke as the Data Librarian, along with Data Steward Louise Corti from the UK Data Archive, Data Publisher Scott Edmunds from Gigascience, and Data Analyst Francine Bennett from Mastodon C. Slides of the presentations are also available, though not from Wright, who spoke without slides. 

Praxis Talk: Demystifying the Digital Humanities

Paige Morgan and Sarah Kremen-Hicks will be talking about their initiative "Demystifying the Digital Humanities" at the next Praxis conversation on Feb. 12th at 12:30 in the Research Commons. The talk will focus on the concept of agency in the digital humanities, and will discuss teaching and modeling agency in an academic context. 

The talk is part of a series of lectures called "Praxis: Doing Scholarship Digitally," designed to create opportunities for researchers from a variety of disciplines to discuss digital tools in their work. The series is co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the University Libraries. http://www.lib.washington.edu/about/news/exhibits/praxis2.