Monthly Archives: May 2012

Linking peer-reviewed literature to associated datasets

OpenAIREplus is a large-scale EU project bringing together 41 pan-European partners, including three cross-disciplinary research communities. OpenAIREplus aims to:

“…create a robust, participatory service for the cross-linking of peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated datasets.”

The 30 month project launched in December 2011 (see Bill’s post on this launch) and on the 11th June they will be presenting an OpenAIREplus workshop in conjunction with the Nordbib Conference 2012 Copenhagen, June 11-13, 2012 . The OpenAIREplus workshop “Linking Open Access publications to data – policy development and implementation” looks really interesting with a very exciting programme and I am hoping they will make the workshop presentations and outputs available after the event.

The workshop is aimed at anyone with an interest in this topic, and will be of interest to library managers, researchers, research funders, repository managers, journal editors and publishers, and research administrators. Topics covered include:

Preparing and writing institutional data management policies
An overview of funder’s responsibilities and requirements towards data availability and management
An overview of linking research publications and data
The research data landscape

Follow developments and news items on the OA EU infrastructure on Twitter @OpenAIRE_eu

Links of interest

OpenAIREplus press release

International conference: Structural frameworks for open, digital research – strategy, policy & infrastructure

OpenAIRE

Data management support for researchers at the University of Glasgow

Today is my first full day on the ADMIRe project and I have been spending some time looking at the really useful and informative research data management website produced by the University of Glasgow. The University of Glasgow aims to develop its research data management capacity and capability and has produced a draft research data policy and a draft RDM roadmap. Both documents can be viewed here.

What is really interesting is that they are aiming to conform to EPSRC expectations regarding the management and provision of access to EPSRC-funded research data between May 2012 and May 2015.

Their pilots will be conducted within schools/divisions where EPSRC funding is most active and they say that:

“…the pilot period will provide us with detailed information regarding the range of operational and support-related costs and sustainability issues and will be used to inform wider testing of the Research Data policy and Roadmap across all Colleges and Schools.”

Finch Committee on Open Access

The Finch Committee was set up last year by the science minister David Willetts. The Finch Committee is examining how UK-funded research ﬁndings can be made more accessible.

Even though the focus is specifically journal articles, conference proceedings and monographs, there is also some parallel work taking place relating to research data and other outputs being conducted by the Royal Society.

All the meeting notes are made available on the website of the Research information Network (RIN). The working group met again last week and are due to report their findings later in the year. Definitely one to look out for.

DOIs for Research Data and RDM Training Materials

ADMIRe induction and #gettingtogrips

I will be starting full-time with ADMIRe next week, so this month has mainly been taken up with ADMIRe induction meetings, project planning with Tom and Bill, allocating tasks from the work packages, preparing presentations, and desk-based research on research data management (RDM) and data information literacy (DIL).

Research Data Management Training Materials

I have been looking at a very wide range of topics/issues related to research data management and have found the outputs from the JISC Research data management training materials (RDMTrain) projects particularly useful. Tomorrow, Tom and I will be joining Wendy (Faculty Team Leader, Medicine and Health Sciences) and colleagues from the Graduate School to explore the potential of the Research Data MANTRA course . This course is designed for PhD students and others who are planning a research project using digital data.

MANTRA is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that may be freely used by anyone. It is available through an open license for re-using, rebranding, and re-purposing. MANTRA is one of the key outputs from the first phase of the JISCMRD programme and has been produced by EDINA and Data Library, a division of Information Services, University of Edinburgh. Further information on the project is available from here.

Today I did a presentation for the Information Literacy Development Group (ILDG) on the issue of RDM and data information literacy skills (DIL). For some useful information on the role of data information literacy and libraries, the presentations from the recent Research Libraries UK (RLUK) event are all available here. This event aimed to clarify the research library agenda with regard to RDM.

DOIs for Research Data

I came across this interesting article today (full-text freely available), published in the May/June 2012 issue of the D-Lib Magazine:

‘Implementing DOIs for Research Data‘, Natasha Simons, Griffith University, Australia. Natasha concludes that implementing DOIs has “raised governance questions common to other institutions that encouraged discussion and collaboration.”

MRD Hack Day Manchester May 2012

Since my start with the ADMIRe project, I’ve been both impressed and terrified by the choice of research data solutions out there. There are: open-source projects, commercial offerings and bespoke institutional software and they all appear to roughly do the same thing in different ways. There are however, certain key functionalities which I believe a research data management system should have:

Ability to store and retrieve research data
Ability to store metadata
Assigns a unique identifier to each data set
Offers a workflow
Handle security and access considerations
Handle various data sets and files
Be robust in terms of software and hardware architecture
Be scalable

No doubt there are numerous other requirements, but these were some of the key functionalities I was looking to explore in greater detail at the JISC sponsored MRD Hack day in Manchester, 3^rd -4^th May 2012. From an ADMIRe perspective, we have a number of technical options that are based upon commercial products and infrastructure. So it was interesting to learn of relevant open-source software during the event and see developers working to implement solutions to problems.

As my interests were in requirements rather than coding, I chose to participate in the metadata working group. During the event we reviewed existing data schemas and outlined a schema that would allow interoperability between institutional repositories. This schema will be used within ADMIRe and the discussions around this subject, provided insight into the types of activities and functions ADMIRe will have to provide.

A real highlight for me was the concept of data papers from Brian Hole of Ubiquity Press. Captured metadata can be used to form a data paper that is searchable and most importantly, is citable via a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).This is very much the friendly-side of metadata and is one of the ways that ADMIRe should be presenting data to the end-user.

From a personal note, it was good to learn from Alex Ball about the DataCite API and actually mint a DOI for a test data set, something that is integral to the reuse aspect of research data.

All in all it was a valuable two days, with plenty of interaction between developers and non-coders alike.

New Staff for ADMIRe

I am delighted to say that ADMIRe now has two new members of staff. Dr Tom Parsons has now started here as Project Manager and Laurian Williamson has started as Service Developer for the project. Tom comes from a background in both bioscience and aerospace, with extensive commercial project management experience. Laurian most recently comes from the JISC Repositories Support Project here at the University and has a wealth of experience in online services, open access and repositories. Both Tom and Laurian can be contacted through the CRC.

Bill