Paul Ginsparg Gets $882,610 Grant for arXiv Enhancement\nPaul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science at Cornell University, has been awarded a $882,610 grant by the NSF for the Tools for Open Access Cyberinfrastructure project, which will enhance the popular arXiv repository. The grant was funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
From a survey of ACRL member libraries, this report examines the scope of library participation in data research services while identifying future opportunities for collaboration, especially in research intensive institutions.
"The data underlying scientific papers should be accessible to researchers both now and in the future, but how best can we ensure that these data are available? Here we examine the effectiveness of four approaches to data archiving: no stated archiving policy, recommending (but not requiring) archiving, and two versions of mandating data deposition at acceptance. We control for differences between data types by trying to obtain data from papers that use a single, widespread population genetic analysis, STRUCTURE. At one extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data online almost a thousand-fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. At one extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data online almost a thousand fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. We also assessed the effectiveness of asking for data directly from authors and obtained over half of the requested datasets, albeit with about 8 days delay and some disagreement with authors. Given the long term benefits of data accessibility to the academic community, we believe that journal based mandatory data archiving policies and mandatory data availability statements should be more widely adopted."
Abstrat: "Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."
Project from 2012, collaboration of UKOLN, University of Bath and Microsoft Research "to assist institutions, research
funders and researchers in growing the capability of
their communities to perform data
intensive research "
from the description; "he theme of this international symposium is the promotion of greater sharing of scientific data for the benefit of research and broader development, particularly in the developing world."
Description: "The focus of this project was on computer-mediated or computational scientific knowledge discovery, taken broadly as any research processes enabled by digital computing technologies. Such technologies may include data mining, information retrieval and extraction, artificial intelligence, distributed grid computing, and others. These technological capabilities support computer-mediated knowledge discovery, which some believe is a new paradigm in the conduct of research. The emphasis was primarily on digitally networked data, rather than on the scientific, technical, and medical literature. The meeting also focused mostly on the advantages of knowledge discovery in open networked environments, although some of the disadvantages were raised as well."
"Objective: This paper describes three different institutional experiences in developing research data management programs and services, challenges/opportunities and lessons learned. Overview: This paper is based on the Librarian Panel Discussion during the 4th Annual University of Massachusetts and New England Region e-Science Symposium."
Developed for the LAK Data Challenge 2013, Cite 4Me is a web application using semantic relationships between queries and data to enable discovery and recommendation of scientific publications
"This new SPARC primer is designed to give campus leaders and other interested parties an overview of what ALMs are, why they matter, how they complement established utilities and metrics, and how they might be considered for use in the tenure and promotion process."
Towards "a curated directory of valuable organized references that are considered a must know for any Open Data stakeholder, including public administration, academia, civil society, private sector, non-governmental institutions, professional consultants, media and publishing industries or topic specialists among others." Use Cases and Requirements draft also available for viewing
"A Data Curation Profile is a resource for Library and Information Science professionals, Archivists, IT professionals, Data Managers, and others who want information about the specific data generated and used in research areas and sub-disciplines that may be published, shared, and preserved for re-use."