Group items tagged

Abstract "Research libraries have sought to apply their information management expertise to the management of digital research data. This focus has been spurred in part by the policies of two major funding agencies in the United States, which require grant recipients make research outputs, including publications and research data, openly available. As many academic libraries are beginning to offer or are already offering assistance in writing and implementing data management plans, it is important to consider how best to support researchers. Our research examined the current data management requirements of major US funding agencies to better understand data management requirements facing researchers and the implications for libraries offering data management services for researchers."

In February 2009, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) commissioned RAND Europe to review approaches to evaluating the impact of research as part of their wider work programme to develop new arrangements for the assessment and funding of research - referred to as the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Review of existing OER (Open Educational Resources) initiative and a discussion of the conditions for a sustainable funding models

According to a news article by the SURFfoundation, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, which "funds thousands of top researchers at universities and institutes and steers the course of Dutch science by means of subsidies and research programmes," will commit five million Euros to support the open access publication of its funded research results.

University of Washington Provost Ana Mari Cauce has allocated permanent funding to the eScience Institute to stimulate the hiring of faculty members who conduct cutting-edge research on methodologies for data-driven discovery, and whose teaching and outreach will put advanced tools and techniques into the hands of UW's broad base of outstanding researchers.

from the abstract: "assessing the influence of spatial proximity between scientists is crucial to promote efficient collaboration strategies and, ultimately, to improve the quality of science. Here we present a systematic analysis of citation and collaboration streams between cities and countries. By assigning papers to the geographic locations of their authors' affiliations, we construct weighted networks of citations and collaborations. The citation flows as well as the collaboration strengths between cities decrease with the distance between them and follow gravity laws with exponents close to 1. Moreover, for a given number of authors, the diversity of affiliations increases the number of citations, especially when many countries are represented. In addition, the total research impact of a country grows linearly with the amount of national funding for research & development. However, the average impact reveals a peculiar threshold effect: the scientific output of a country may reach an impact larger than the world average only if the country invests more than 120,000 US $ per researcher annually. Our results reveal the overall structure of scientific research by showing the correlation between collaboration, citation, geography and funding, and could provide valuable inputs in shaping the future science policies."

THe report (UK) everyone in the OA community is talking about - proposes OA to all research outputs from publicly funded research

call for sustaining funding models

MIT librarians report results of a survey of NIH-funded faculty members and researchers on their experiences with the publishing process. Possible areas of library support and partnership are considered.

STAR METRICS programme - "The first aim of the programme is to build a 'clean' database of all federally funded researchers in the United States ... Later on, the plan is to track patents, citations and other metrics of the research's impact. ... researchers' use of the Internet to communicate and publish will enable STAR METRICS to track the creation and transfer of knowledge properly for the first time"

Abstract: The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary to examine the arguments for sharing data and how those arguments match the motivations and interests of the scientific community and the public. Four arguments are examined: to make the results of publicly funded data available to the public, to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, to advance the state of science, and to reproduce research. Libraries need to consider their role in the face of each of these arguments, and what expertise and systems they require for data curation.

Calls for an inventory of federally-funded research datasets toward better data stewardship

Digital media and the Internet are transforming how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. A newly-created Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California-Irvine will provide an international center to nurture exploration of and build evidence around the impact of digital media on young people's learning and its potential for transforming education. Funded through a $2.97 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Center was announced today at a national forum at Google headquarters that brought together leading thinkers around the challenge of reasserting American global leadership in education.

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.

The OSG/CMU Scientific Software Ecosystem Workshop was held February 16 & 17, 2010 in Los Angeles, supported by the National Science Foundation through grant #0943168. It was an invitation workshop on scientific software development ecosystems, organized by the SciSoft research team at CMU (Jim Herbsleb and James Howison) and the Open Science Grid, hosted by LIGO at CalTech (special thanks to Kent Blackburn). The purpose of the workshop was to learn from each other in order to improve how we produce, share and sustain scientific software in our various fields and to develop positions regarding possible scientific research funding agency policies on software practices.

Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) project highlights, culling some 40,000 answers reflecting positive views of open access while reflecting concerns with funding and journal quality. An introduction to the survey is presented with links to survey data.

Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of systems and organizations to work together. In this paper, we discuss the premises underlying a novel Policy and Quality Interoperability Framework, taking into account the preliminary outcomes and the recommendations of the Policy and Quality Working Groups that are currently being run by the EU co-funded project Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices, and Modeling Foundations (DL.org).

Investigates data from two multi-user studies funded by IMLS, finding convenience is a determinative of infomation seeking regardless of "age, gender, academic role," virtual or non-virtual use.