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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.
Lisa Johnston

GSA Publications - Data Repository - 0 views

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    data repository linking data to publications.
umgeoglib

Project MUSE - Library Trends - Volume 57, Number 2, Fall 2008 - 0 views

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    4 Articles related to data curation/data management: At the Watershed: Preparing for Research Data Management and Stewardship at the University of Minnesota Libraries Case Study in Data Curation at Johns Hopkins University Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science Institutional Repositories and Research Data Curation in a Distributed Environment
Lisa Johnston

The Current Status of Scientific Data Sharing and Spatial Data Services in China | Moun... - 2 views

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    There are a lot of scientific data repositories in China that have been growing since the 90's. Interesting sea change of ethics and sharing practices.
Amy West

Liveblog: BRDI: Author Deposit Mandates for Federal Research Grantees : Gavin Baker - 0 views

  • DC Principles Coalition: We believe in free access to science, within the constraints of our business models.
  • The public doesn’t need access to the full articles
  • The problem is that consumers want everything for free.
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  • Repositories can do all the functions of journals except quality control, and we don’t want government doing that.
  • Social sciences often left out of discussions about data curation, open access, etc.
  • We could argue that taxpayers paid for the research in general, not necessarily each publication.
  • But the Public Access Policy requires the peer-reviewed manuscript, not the one after which the publishers add value. The America COMPETES model, for un-peer-reviewed grant proposals, is almost useless to the public. In health, you want the refereed results, not the grantee’s report to the agency.
  • If journals can’t survive, from an economic perspective, that’s not harm — it’s just a failure to adapt.
  • Journal growth trends with funding for researchers. As universities want to be more prestigious, they aim to publish more. Trying to have access to everything requires too much money — you have to prioritize.
umgeoglib

AfricaMap - 0 views

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    Contains maps but also pulls in information about researchers data from dataverse. In Beta....looking for ideas about how to use this tool for scholars to collaborate.
umgeoglib

DVN - Homepage - 0 views

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    List of Social Sciences data available via IQSS Dataverse Network
Lisa Johnston

Data Archiving - The American Naturalist - 2 views

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    Science depends on good data. Data are central to our understanding of the natural world, yet most data in ecology and evolution are lost to science-except perhaps in summary form-very quickly after they are collected. ... Yet these data, even after the main results for which they were collected are published, are invaluable to science, for meta‐analysis, new uses, and quality control.
Amy West

Open access to research data a lot tougher than you think - 2 views

  • It means that researchers need to deal with the formatting and deposition of data, an annoying step when they would rather be focusing on their next project. Given the time lag, it's also difficult to associate the correct metadata with the material that's being a
  • According to the commentary, scientists view data deposition as a burden due to the extra work it involves. Research data is usually not in the correct format for submission to repositories when the project is completed, and so the scientist must take the time to convert it.
  • The authors here propose a new approach to data management, where each research institution should employ data managers to work with scientists and administer local, structured data storage. Local storage and support is the preference of most scientists, who would rather not hand off control of their data to remote strangers.
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