International Journal of Digital Curation
Not a member yet
605 research outputs found
Sort by
The Future of Data Management Planning: Tools, Policies, and Players
Get PDFDMPonline and the DMPTool are well-established tools for data management planning. As the software of each matures and the user communities grow, we turn our attention to issues of sustainability, culture change, and international collaboration. Here we outline strategies for addressing these issues. We propose to build a new, global framework for data management planning that links plans to researchers, funders, publications, data, and other components of the research lifecycle. By refocusing our efforts from promoting the creation of data management plans (DMPs) to comply with funder requirements to supporting the creation of good DMPs that can be implemented, we seek to further enable the open scholarship revolution, advancing science and society
Promoting Interactive Visualisation at University of Oxford: The Live Data Network
Get PDFThis article introduces the Live Data project funded by the Research IT Board of the University of Oxford’s IT Services department. The primary aim of the project is to support academics in creating interactive visualisations using a variety of cloud-based visualisation services, which the academic can freely embed within academic journals, blogs and personal websites through the use of iframes. To achieve this the project has been funded from October 2015 to March 2017 to recruit visualisation case studies from across the University and to develop software agnostic workflows for the creation of interactive visualisations. Within this report we present interactive visualisations as a vital component of the academic’s toolkit for engaging potential collaborators and the general public with their research data – thereby bridging the so-called ‘data gap’ between data, publication and researcher.Â
A Report of Data-Intensive Capability, Institutional Support, and Data Management Practices in Social Sciences
Get PDFWe report on a case study which examines the social science community’s capability and institutional support for data management. Fourteen researchers were invited for an in-depth qualitative survey between June 2014 and October 2015. We modify and adopt the Community Capability Model Framework (CCMF) profile tool to ask these scholars to self-assess their current data practices and whether their academic environment provides enough supportive infrastructure for data related activities. The exemplar disciplines in this report include anthropology, political sciences, and library and information science. Our findings deepen our understanding of social disciplines and identify capabilities that are well developed and those that are poorly developed. The participants reported that their institutions have made relatively slow progress on economic supports and data science training courses, but acknowledged that they are well informed and trained for participants’ privacy protection. The result confirms a prior observation from previous literature that social scientists are concerned with ethical perspectives but lack technical training and support. The results also demonstrate intra- and inter-disciplinary commonalities and differences in researcher perceptions of data-intensive capability, and highlight potential opportunities for the development and delivery of new and impactful research data management support services to social sciences researchers and faculty.Â
Using Data Management Plans to Explore Variability in Research Data Management Practices Across Domains
Get PDFThis paper describes an investigation into how researchers in different fields are interpreting and responding to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s data management plan (DMP) requirement. As documents written by the researchers themselves, DMPs can provide insight into researchers’ understanding of the potential value of their data to others; the environment in which their data are developed and prepared; and their willingness and ability to ensure the data are available to others now and in the long-term. With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the authors conducted a content analysis of DMPs generated at their respective institutions using a shared rubric. By developing and testing a rubric designed to understand and evaluate the content of DMPs, the authors intend to develop a more complete understanding, at a larger scale, of how researchers plan for managing, sharing, and archiving their data.Â
Data trajectories: tracking reuse of published data for transitive credit attribution
Get PDFThe ability to measure the use and impact of published data sets is key to the success of the open data/open science paradigm. A direct measure of impact would require tracking data (re)use in the wild, which is difficult to achieve. This is therefore commonly replaced by simpler metrics based on data download and citation counts. In this paper we describe a scenario where it is possible to track the trajectory of a dataset after its publication, and show how this enables the design of accurate models for ascribing credit to data originators. A Data Trajectory (DT) is a graph that encodes knowledge of how, by whom, and in which context data has been re-used, possibly after several generations. We provide a theoretical model of DTs that is grounded in the W3C PROV data model for provenance, and we show how DTs can be used to automatically propagate a fraction of the credit associated with transitively derived datasets, back to original data contributors. We also show this model of transitive credit in action by means of a Data Reuse Simulator. In the longer term, our ultimate hope is that credit models based on direct measures of data reuse will provide further incentives to data publication. We conclude by outlining a research agenda to address the hard questions of creating, collecting, and using DTs systematically across a large number of data reuse instances in the wild
Scientific Knowledge Mobilization: Co-evolution of Data Products and Designated Communities
Get PDFDigital data are accumulating rapidly, yet issues relating to data production remain unexamined. Data sharing efforts in particular are nascent, disunited and incomplete. We investigate the development of data products tailored for diverse communities with differing knowledge bases. We explore not the technical aspects of how, why, or where data are made available, but rather the socio-scientific aspects influencing what data products are created and made available for use. These products differ from compact data summaries often published in journals. We report on development by a national data center of two data collections describing the changing polar environment. One collection characterizes sea ice products derived from satellite remote sensing data and development unfolds over three decades. The second collection characterizes the Greenland Ice Sheet melt where development of an initial collection of data products over a period of several months was informed by insights gained from earlier experience. In documenting the generation of these two collections, a data product development cycle supported by a data product team is identified as key to mobilizing scientific knowledge. The collections reveal a co-evolution of data products and designated communities where community interest may be triggered by events such as environmental disturbance and new modes of communication. These examples of data product development in practice illustrate knowledge mobilization in the earth sciences; the collections create a bridge between data producers and a growing number of audiences interested in making evidence-based decisions. Â
The location of the citation: changing practices in how publications cite original data in the Dryad Digital Repository
Get PDFWhile stakeholders in scholarly communication generally agree on the importance of data citation, there is not consensus on where those citations should be placed within the publication – particularly when the publication is citing original data. Recently, CrossRef and the Digital Curation Center (DCC) have recommended as a best practice that original data citations appear in the works cited sections of the article. In some fields, such as the life sciences, this contrasts with the common practice of only listing data identifier(s) within the article body (intratextually). We inquired whether data citation practice has been changing in light of the guidance from CrossRef and the DCC. We examined data citation practices from 2011 to 2014 in a corpus of 1,125 articles associated with original data in the Dryad Digital Repository. The percentage of articles that include no reference to the original data has declined each year, from 31% in 2011 to 15% in 2014. The percentage of articles that include data identifiers intratextually has grown from 69% to 83%, while the percentage that cite data in the works cited section has grown from 5% to 8%. If the proportions continue to grow at the current rate of 19-20% annually, the proportion of articles with data citations in the works cited section will not exceed 90% until 2030.Â
Developing a Data Vault
Get PDFResearch data is being generated at an ever-increasing rate. This brings challenges in how to store, analyse, and care for the data. A component of this problem is the stewardship of data and associated files that need a safe and secure home for the medium to long-term. As part of typical suites of Research Data Management services, researchers are provided with large allocations of ‘active data storage’. This is often stored on expensive and fast disks to enable efficient transfer and working with large amounts of data. However, over time this active data store fills up, and researchers need a facility to move older but still valuable data to cheaper storage for long-term care. In addition, research funders are increasingly requiring data to be stored in forms that allow it to be described and retrieved in the future. For data that can’t be shared publicly in an open repository, a closed solution is required that can make use of offline or near-line storage for cost efficiency. This paper describes a solution to these requirements, called the Data Vault.Â
Revisiting the Data Lifecycle with Big Data Curation
Get PDFAs science becomes more data-intensive and collaborative, researchers increasingly use larger and more complex data to answer research questions. The capacity of storage infrastructure, the increased sophistication and deployment of sensors, the ubiquitous availability of computer clusters, the development of new analysis techniques, and larger collaborations allow researchers to address grand societal challenges in a way that is unprecedented. In parallel, research data repositories have been built to host research data in response to the requirements of sponsors that research data be publicly available. Libraries are re-inventing themselves to respond to a growing demand to manage, store, curate and preserve the data produced in the course of publicly funded research. As librarians and data managers are developing the tools and knowledge they need to meet these new expectations, they inevitably encounter conversations around Big Data. This paper explores definitions of Big Data that have coalesced in the last decade around four commonly mentioned characteristics: volume, variety, velocity, and veracity. We highlight the issues associated with each characteristic, particularly their impact on data management and curation. We use the methodological framework of the data life cycle model, assessing two models developed in the context of Big Data projects and find them lacking. We propose a Big Data life cycle model that includes activities focused on Big Data and more closely integrates curation with the research life cycle. These activities include planning, acquiring, preparing, analyzing, preserving, and discovering, with describing the data and assuring quality being an integral part of each activity. We discuss the relationship between institutional data curation repositories and new long-term data resources associated with high performance computing centers, and reproducibility in computational science. We apply this model by mapping the four characteristics of Big Data outlined above to each of the activities in the model. This mapping produces a set of questions that practitioners should be asking in a Big Data projec
Research Data Sharing and Reuse Practices of Academic Faculty Researchers: A Study of the Virginia Tech Data Landscape
Get PDFThis paper presents the results of a research data assessment and landscape study in the institutional context of Virginia Tech to determine the data sharing and reuse practices of academic faculty researchers. Through mapping the level of user engagement in “openness of data,” “openness of methodologies and workflows,” and “reuse of existing data,” this study contributes to the current knowledge in data sharing and open access, and supports the strategic development of institutional data stewardship. Asking faculty researchers to self-reflect sharing and reuse from both data producers’ and data users’ perspectives, the study reveals a significant gap between the rather limited sharing activities and the highly perceived reuse or repurpose values regarding data, indicating that potential values of data for future research are lost right after the original work is done. The localized and sporadic data management and documentation practices of researchers also contribute to the obstacles they themselves often encounter when reusing existing data.Â