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Amy West

Developing the Capability and Skills to Support eResearch - 0 views

  • Of particular concern to this article is the need for improved levels of data stewardship to enable good data management for long-term sustainability, both at national and institutional levels.
  • researchers, particularly those engaged in data-intensive research; systems developers, data scientists and other technical staff; data managers of institutional repositories, data archives and discipline-based data centres and their support staff, with those who liaise between depositors and the repository as being of particular interest; and those who are engaged in high-level policy formulation, either in government or research institutions.
  • Interviews were conducted with twelve key established researchers in six Australian institutions, with a focus on academics engaged in data-intensive research. Interviews were conducted also with the manager of a large data centre, and a repository administrator. The institutions concerned were the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Tasmania, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and one area of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
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  • There was wide agreement that there are three types of skills required for practitioners of eResearch, their support staff and repository staff. Not surprisingly, there was a strong need for technical skills. Perhaps not as obvious was the identification of a wide range of non-technical skills. Less obvious again was mention of an assortment of personal qualities, which, while not skills in the formal sense of the term, were singled out as being important.
  • The surveys indicated that not everyone needs the same level of technical skills to conduct or support eResearch.
  • So you need a basic literacy level to look after your computers where you’re storing your data, and then in order to access, like a remote repository, you need to know something about how to connect to that remote repository, what the format of the data should be to go in it, how to convert your data to that required format
  • included skills related to high-performance computing (HPC) and the access grid, data (and database) management, data curation, information engineering, information modelling, software development, remote communications, distributed processing, informatics, portal design, computational fluid dynamics, database integration, visualisation and programming of all kinds.
  • Some of these skills are tightly connected to specific disciplines, especially informatics.
  • The need for technical skills is allied to the ability to understand end-to-end workflows, especially for repository managers and developers who need to be able to think like the researcher and to apply that understanding to developing the repository. By workflows, I mean the many software applications, processing operations and interactions required for research tasks to be carried through to completion.
  • The group of librarians at ‘The Researcher Librarian Nexus’ workshop identified a need for further development of their technical skills, mentioning in particular metadata, something which did not feature among any of the other responses, other than by implication.
  • These vary from skills in data analysis (including the use of statistical packages and other techniques such as data mining) through information seeking to a broader range of general skills. Project management, business analysis, communications, negotiation, intellectual property, team building and train the trainer were mentioned specifically. Another was generic problem solving, because, as one researcher aptly put it, the kinds of problems which arise when undertaking eResearch mean that ‘There’s never going to be someone who has done it before.’
  • The librarians involved with the Researcher/Librarian Nexus workshop also identified it as being of high priority for repository managers, along with marketing, advocacy, copyright, metadata, educational outreach and grant submission writing. They also singled out the intriguing skill of ‘researcher management’ while not specifying precisely what this might entail.
  • A good grasp of copyright and intellectual property issues was seen as essential,
  • These were listed as: open-mindedness, patience and an ‘ability to cooperate and collaborate rather than compete’
  • For example, one researcher, in the field of finance told me of his need for programmers who have a high level of expertise in economics, econometrics, statistics, maths and programming; ‘otherwise all the programming expertise doesn’t really help because then they make strange assumptions in their coding that just result in nonsense output.’
  • One solution to the need to bridge the disciplinary gap is to use graduate students to help with the technical aspects, where those students have an interest and aptitude for this kind of work. In some cases this might be done by providing scholarships, the students then graduating with a PhD on the basis their contribution to the research project has been of sufficient originality to warrant the degree.
  • The barrier to research most often mentioned was the difficulty in assembling all the skills required to conduct a project, particularly in relation to data management and stewardship. In some cases the gap is organisational, as happens for example when the researcher is either unaware of or unable to tap into the skills of a central IT unit. More often the gap was in a lack of understanding of what each group needs, what each has to offer and where responsibilities lie. Examples of this can be seen in comments like the following:
  • For instance if you’ve got data in say NetCDF file formats and the repository wants it in TIFF format, well you need to know something about the technicality of getting your data from NetCDF format into TIFF format.
  • The humanities and social sciences are notable areas where the take-up rate of eResearch has been slower than, for example, in the hard sciences, and where there have been calls for exemplars to be publicised. Many practitioners in the humanities and social sciences find it difficult to envisage where their work might fit into the concept of eResearch.
  • Few researchers are aware that there are such things as repositories, so it is important that the repository is seen as (and indeed is) ‘a good repository – that it’s good in the sense of its high quality but also good in that it adds value for [the researcher].’
  • If research institutions are to minimise the gap between the ideals and realities of eResearch, there is some way to go in providing both institutional capacity and appropriately qualified individuals. While eResearch is dependent on good ICT infrastructure, this is not sufficient in itself. The results of the survey outlined here show that capacity in information technology skills is important but must be accompanied by a range of non-technical skills in such areas as project management. Equally important is the creation of research environments which are covered by well-propagated and understood policies, which are appropriately organised into structures with clearly delineated roles and responsibilities and which minimise the current barriers experienced by many researchers.
David Govoni

SciLink - 0 views

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    A specialized science-oriented community on the Facebook and LinkedIn models. SciLink™ is an online community with the goal of helping you to discover scientists, authors, and relationships.
Lisa Johnston

Digital Curation Centre: DCC SCARP Project - 0 views

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    18 January 2010 | Key perspectives | Type: report The Digital Curation Centre is pleased to announce the report "Data Dimensions: Disciplinary Differences in Research Data Sharing, Reuse and Long term Viability" by Key Perspectives, as one of the final outputs of the DCC SCARP project. The project investigated attitudes and approaches to data deposit, sharing and reuse, curation and preservation, over a range of research fields in differing disciplines. The synthesis report (which drew on the SCARP case studies plus a number of others, identified in the Appendix), identifies factors that help understand how curation practices in research groups differ in disciplinary terms. This provides a backdrop to different digital curation approaches.
Amy West

Interagency Data Stewardship/Citations/provider guidelines - Federation of Earth Scienc... - 0 views

    • Amy West
       
      Little confused by what's meant by "data sets should be cited like books" since they go on to provide really good reasons why data aren't like books, e.g. need subsetting information, access date for dynamic databases.
  • The guidelines build from the IPY Guidelines and are compatible with the DataCite Metadata Scheme for the Publication and Citation of Research Data, Version 2.2, July 2011.
  • In some cases, the data set authors may have also published a paper describing the data in great detail. These sort of data papers should be encouraged, and both the paper and the data set should be cited when the data are used.
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  • Ongoing updates to a time series do change the content of the data set, but they do not typically constitute a new version or edition of a data set. New versions typically reflect changes in sampling protocols, algorithms, quality control processes, etc. Both a new version and an update may be reflected in the release date.
  • Locator, Identifier, or Distribution Medium
  • Then it is necessary to include a persistant reference to the location of the data.
  • This may be the most challenging aspect of data citation. It is necessary to enable "micro-citation" or the ability to refer to the specific data used--the exact files, granules, records, etc.
  • Data stewards should suggest how to reference subsets of their data. With Earth science data, subsets can often be identified by referring to a temporal and spatial range.
  • A particular data set may be part of a compilation, in which case it is appropriate to cite the data set somewhat like a chapter in an edited volume.
  • Increasingly, publishers are allowing data supplements to be published along with peer-reviewed research papers. When using the data supplement one need only cite the parent reference. F
  • Confusingly, a Digital Object Identifier is a locator. It is a Handle based scheme whereby the steward of the digital object registers a location (typically a URL) for the object. There is no guarantee that the object at the registered location will remain unchanged. Consider a continually updated data time series, for example.
  • While it is desirable to uniquely identify the cited object, it has proven extremely challenging to identify whether two data sets or data files are scientifically identical.
  • At this point, we must rely on location information combined with other information such as author, title, and version to uniquely identify data used in a study.
  • The key to making registered locators, such as DOIs, ARKS, or Handles, work unambiguously to identify and locate data sets is through careful tracking and documentation of versions.
  • how to handle different data set versions relative to an assigned locator.
  • Track major_version.minor_version.[archive_version].
  • Typically, something that affects the whole data set like a reprocessing would be considered a major version.
  • Assign unique locators to major versions.
  • Old locators for retired versions should be maintained and point to some appropriate web site that explains what happened to the old data if they were not archived.
  • A new major version leads to the creation of a new collection-level metadata record that is distributed to appropriate registries. The older metadata record should remain with a pointer to the new version and with explanation of the status of the older version data.
  • Major and minor version should be listed in the recommended citation.
  • inor versions should be explained in documentation
  • Ongoing additions to an existing time series need not constitute a new version. This is one reason for capturing the date accessed when citing the data.
  • we believe it is currently impossible to fully satisfy the requirement of scientific reproducibility in all situations
  • To aid scientific reproducibility through direct, unambiguous reference to the precise data used in a particular study. (This is the paramount purpose and also the hardest to achieve). To provide fair credit for data creators or authors, data stewards, and other critical people in the data production and curation process. To ensure scientific transparency and reasonable accountability for authors and stewards. To aid in tracking the impact of data set and the associated data center through reference in scientific literature. To help data authors verify how their data are being used. To help future data users identify how others have used the data.
  • The ESIP Preservation and Stewardship cluster has examined these and other current approaches and has found that they are generally compatible and useful, but they do not entirely meet all the purposes of Earth science data citation.
  • In general, data sets should be cited like books.
  • hey need to use the style dictated by their publishers, but by providing an example, data stewards can give users all the important elements that should be included in their citations of data sets
  • Access Date and Time--because data can be dynamic and changeable in ways that are not always reflected in release dates and versions, it is important to indicate when on-line data were accessed.
  • Additionally, it is important to provide a scheme for users to indicate the precise subset of data that were used. This could be the temporal and spatial range of the data, the types of files used, a specific query id, or other ways of describing how the data were subsetted.
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