International Journal of Digital Curation
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DMP Online and DMPTool: Different Strategies Towards a Shared Goal
Get PDFThis paper provides a comparative discussion of the strategies employed in the UK’s DMP Online tool and the US’s DMPTool, both designed to provide a structured environment for research data management planning (DMP) with explicit links to funder requirements. Following the Sixth International Digital Curation Conference, held in Chicago in December 2010, a number of US institutions partnered with the Digital Curation Centre’s DMP Online team to learn from their experiences while developing a US counterpart. DMPTool arrived in beta in August 2011 and released a production version in November 2011. This joint paper will compare and contrast use cases, organizational and national/cultural characteristics that have influenced the development decisions, outcomes achieved so far, and planned future developments
Developments in Research Funder Data Policy
Get PDFThis paper reviews developments in funders’ data management and sharing policies, and explores the extent to which they have affected practice. The Digital Curation Centre has been monitoring UK research funders’ data policies since 2008. There have been significant developments in subsequent years, most notably the joint Research Councils UK’s Common Principles on Data Policy and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Policy Framework on Research Data. This paper charts these changes and highlights shifting emphasises in the policies. Institutional data policies and infrastructure are increasingly being developed as a result of these changes. While action is clearly being taken, questions remain about whether the changes are affecting practice on the ground
What Your Tweets Tell Us About You: Identity, Ownership and Privacy of Twitter Data
Get PDFSocial networking sites and other social media have enabled new forms of collaborative communication and participation for users, and created additional value as rich data sets for research. Research based on accessing, mining, and analyzing social media data has risen steadily over the last several years and is increasingly multidisciplinary; researchers from the social sciences, humanities, computer science and other domains have used social media data as the basis of their studies. The broad use of this form of data has implications for how curators address preservation, access and reuse for an audience with divergent disciplinary norms related to privacy, ownership, authenticity and reliability.In this paper, we explore how the characteristics of the Twitter platform, coupled with an ambiguous and evolving understanding of privacy in networked communication, and divergent disciplinary understandings of the resulting data, combine to create complex issues for curators trying to ensure broad-based and ethical reuse of Twitter data. We provide a case study of a specific data set to illustrate how data curators can engage with the topics and questions raised in the paper. While some initial suggestions are offered to librarians and other information professionals who are beginning to receive social media data from researchers, our larger goal is to stimulate discussion and prompt additional research on the curation and preservation of social media data
Managing Risks in the Preservation of Research Data with Preservation Networks
Get PDFNetwork modelling provides a framework for the systematic analysis of needs and options for preservation. A number of general strategies can be identified, characterised and applied to many situations; these strategies may be combined to produce robust preservation solutions tailored to the needs of the community and responsive to their environment. This paper provides an overview of this approach. We describe the components of a Preservation Network Model and go on to show how it may be used to plan preservation actions according to the requirements of the particular situation using illustrative examples from scientific archives
Building an Open Data Repository for a Specialized Research Community: Process, Challenges and Lessons
Get PDFIn 2009, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University began building an open access digital collection of social science experimental data, metadata, and associated files produced by ISPS researchers. The digital repository was created to support the replication of research findings and to enable further data analysis and instruction. Content is submitted to a rigorous process of quality assessment and normalization, including transformation of statistical code into R, an open source statistical software. Other requirements included: (a) that the repository be integrated with the current database of publications and projects publicly available on the ISPS website; (b) that it offered open access to datasets, documentation, and statistical software program files; (c) that it utilized persistent linking services and redundant storage provided within the Yale Digital Commons infrastructure; and (d) that it operated in accordance with the prevailing standards of the digital preservation community. In partnership with Yale’s Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI), the ISPS Data Archive was launched in the fall of 2010. We describe the process of creating the repository, discuss prospects for similar projects in the future, and explain how this specialized repository fits into the larger digital landscape at Yale
Opening Up Climate Research: A Linked Data Approach to Publishing Data Provenance
Get PDFTraditionally, the formal scientific output in most fields of natural science has been limited to peer-reviewed academic journal publications, with less attention paid to the chain of intermediate data results and their associated metadata, including provenance. In effect, this has constrained the representation and verification of the data provenance to the confines of the related publications. Detailed knowledge of a dataset’s provenance is essential to establish the pedigree of the data for its effective re-use, and to avoid redundant re-enactment of the experiment or computation involved. It is increasingly important for open-access data to determine their authenticity and quality, especially considering the growing volumes of datasets appearing in the public domain. To address these issues, we present an approach that combines the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) – a widely adopted citation technique – with existing, widely adopted climate science data standards to formally publish detailed provenance of a climate research dataset as an associated scientific workflow. This is integrated with linked-data compliant data re-use standards (e.g. OAI-ORE) to enable a seamless link between a publication and the complete trail of lineage of the corresponding dataset, including the dataset itself
Beyond the Data Deluge: A Research Agenda for Large-Scale Data Sharing and Reuse
Get PDFThere is almost universal agreement that scientific data should be shared for use beyond the purposes for which they were initially collected. Access to data enables system-level science, expands the instruments and products of research to new communities, and advances solutions to complex human problems. While demands for data are not new, the vision of open access to data is increasingly ambitious. The aim is to make data accessible and usable to anyone, anytime, anywhere, and for any purpose. Until recently, scholarly investigations related to data sharing and reuse were sparse. They have become more common as technology and instrumentation have advanced, policies that mandate sharing have been implemented, and research has become more interdisciplinary. Each of these factors has contributed to what is commonly referred to as the "data deluge". Most discussions about increases in the scale of sharing and reuse have focused on growing amounts of data. There are other issues related to open access to data that also concern scale which have not been as widely discussed: broader participation in data sharing and reuse, increases in the number and types of intermediaries, and more digital data products. The purpose of this paper is to develop a research agenda for scientific data sharing and reuse that considers these three areas
Towards a Holistic Approach to Policy Interoperability in Digital Libraries and Digital Repositories
Get PDFUnderpinning every digital library and digital repository there is a policy framework, which makes the digital library viable - without a policy framework a digital library is little more than a container for content. Policy governs how a digital library is instantiated and run. It is therefore a meta-domain which is situated both outside the digital library and any technologies used to deliver it, and within the digital library itself. Policy is also a key aspect of digital library and digital repository interoperability in a common and integrated information space. Policy interoperability - that is the exchange and reuse of policies - is a step beyond policy standardisation. Furthermore, effective and efficient policy frameworks are also one of the Digital Curation Center (DCC), DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), nestor and Center for Research Libraries (CRL) core criteria for digital repositories. In this article, we share our research on policy interoperability levels and the experimental survey on policy interoperability conducted with real-life digital libraries, as a contribution towards the definition of a Policy Interoperability Framework
Open Science in Practice: Researcher Perspectives and Participation
Get PDFWe report on an exploratory study consisting of brief case studies in selected disciplines, examining what motivates researchers to work (or want to work) in an open manner with regard to their data, results and protocols, and whether advantages are delivered by working in this way. We review the policy background to open science, and literature on the benefits attributed to open data, considering how these relate to curation and to questions of who participates in science. The case studies investigate the perceived benefits to researchers, research institutions and funding bodies of utilising open scientific methods, the disincentives and barriers, and the degree to which there is evidence to support these perceptions. Six case study groups were selected in astronomy, bioinformatics, chemistry, epidemiology, language technology and neuroimaging. The studies identify relevant examples and issues through qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. We provide a typology of degrees of open working across the research lifecycle, and conclude that better support for open working, through guidelines to assist research groups in identifying the value and costs of working more openly, and further research to assess the risks, incentives and shifts in responsibility entailed by opening up the research process are needed
Implementing Metadata that Guide Digital Preservation Services
Get PDFEffective digital preservation depends on a set of preservation services that work together to ensure that digital objects can be preserved for the long-term. These services need digital preservation metadata, in particular, descriptions of the properties that digital objects may have and descriptions of the requirements that guide digital preservation services. This paper analyzes how these services interact and use these metadata and develops a data dictionary to support them