Jour : 23 avril 2014

On the Role of Research Data Centres in the Management of Publication-related Research Data

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This paper summarizes the findings of an analysis of scientific infrastructure service providers (mainly from Germany but also from other European countries). These service providers are evaluated with regard to their potential services for the management of publication-related research data in the field of social sciences, especially economics. For this purpose we conducted both desk research and an online survey of 46 research data centres (RDCs), library networks and public archives; almost 48% responded to our survey. We find that almost three-quarters of all respondents generally store externally generated research data – which also applies to publication-related data.

Almost 75% of all respondents also store and host the code of computation or the syntax of statistical analyses. If self-compiled software components are used to generate research outputs, only 40% of all respondents accept these software components for storing and hosting. Eight out of ten institutions also take specific action to ensure long-term data preservation. With regard to the documentation of stored and hosted research data, almost 70% of respondents claim to use the metadata schema of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI); Dublin Core is used by 30% (multiple answers were permitted). Almost two-thirds also use persistent identifiers to facilitate citation of these datasets. Three in four also support researchers in creating metadata for their data. Application programming interfaces (APIs) for uploading or searching datasets currently are not yet implemented by any of the respondents. Least common is the use of semantic technologies like RDF.

Concluding, the paper discusses the outcome of our survey in relation to Research Data Centres (RDCs) and the roles and responsibilities of publication-related data archives for journals in the fields of social sciences.”

URL : On the Role of Research Data Centres in the Management of Publication-related Research Data
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9356

Research libraries’ new role in research data management…

Statut

Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark :

“The amount of research data is growing constantly, due to new technology with new potentials for collecting and analysing both digital data and research objects. This growth creates a demand for a coherent IT-infrastructure. Such an infrastructure must be able to provide facilities for storage, preservation and a more open access to data in order to fulfil the demands from the researchers themselves, the research councils and research foundations.
This paper presents the findings of a research project carried out under the auspices of DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek — Denmark’s Electronic Research Library) to analyse how the Danish universities store, preserve and provide access to research data. It shows that they do not have a common IT-infrastructure for research data management. This paper describes the various paths chosen by individual universities and research institutions, and the background for their strategies of research data management. Among the main reasons for the uneven practices are the lack of a national policy in this field, the different scientific traditions and cultures and the differences in the use and organization of IT-services.
This development contains several perspectives that are of particular relevance to research libraries. As they already curate digital collections and are active in establishing web archives, the research libraries become involved in research and dissemination of knowledge in new ways. This paper gives examples of how The State and University Library’s services facilitate research data management with special regard to digitization of research objects, storage, preservation and sharing of research data.
This paper concludes that the experience and skills of research libraries make the libraries important partners in a research data management infrastructure.”

URL : Research libraries’ new role in research data management, current trends and visions in Denmark
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/9173

Novel Research Impact Indicators

Statut

Citation counts and more recently usage statistics provide valuable information about the attention and research impact associated with scholarly publications.

The open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) has pioneered the concept of article-level metrics, where these metrics are collected on a per article and not a per journal basis and are complemented by real-time data from the social web or altmetrics: blog posts, social bookmarks, social media and other.

URL : Novel Research Impact Indicators
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8427

Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project

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The ICT revolution of the last decades impacted scientific communication as it has impacted many other forms of communications, changing the way in which articles are delivered and how they can be discovered.

However, the impact of ICT on the research itself has been much more profound, introducing digital tools to the way in which researchers gather data, perform analyses, and exchange results.

This brought new, digital forms of research output, and disseminating those calls for changes deeply impact the core format of the scientific article.

In 2009, Elsevier introduced the “Article of the Future” project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions.

First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories — such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly.

We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results.

The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?

URL : Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: the Elsevier Article of the Future Project
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8446

Enhanced Publications Data Models and Information Systems …

Statut

Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems :

““Enhanced publications” are commonly intended as digital publications that consist of a mandatory narrative part (the description of the research conducted) plus related “parts”, such as datasets, other publications, images, tables, workflows, devices. The state-of-the-art on information systems for enhanced publications has today reached the point where some kind of common understanding is required, in order to provide the methodology and language for scientists to compare, analyse, or simply discuss the multitude of solutions in the field. In this paper, we thoroughly examined the literature with a two-fold aim: firstly, introducing the terminology required to describe and compare structural and semantic features of existing enhanced publication data models; secondly, proposing a classification of enhanced publication information systems based on their main functional goals.”

URL : Enhanced Publications: Data Models and Information Systems
Alternative URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8445