Research Data Management Status of Science and Technology Research Institutes in Korea

Authors : Myung-seok Choi, Sanghwan Lee

Recent advances in digital technology and the data-driven science paradigm has led to a proliferation of research data, which are becoming more important in scholarly communications.

The sharing and reuse of research data can play a key role in enhancing the reusability and reproducibility of research, and data from publicly funded projects are assumed to be public goods. This is seen as a movement of open science and, more specifically, open research data.

Many countries, such as the USA, UK, and Australia, are pushing ahead with implementing policies and infrastructure for open research data. In this paper, we present survey results pertaining to the creation, management, and utilization of data for researchers from government-funded research institutes of science and technology in Korea.

We then introduce recent regulations stipulating a mandated data management plan for national R&D projects and on-going efforts to realize open research data in Korea.

URL : Research Data Management Status of Science and Technology Research Institutes in Korea

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-029

Research Data Management as an Integral Part of the Research Process of Empirical Disciplines Using Landscape Ecology as an Example

Authors : Winfried Schröder, Stefan Nickel

Research Data Management (RDM) is regarded as an elementary component of empirical disciplines. Taking Landscape Ecology in Germany as an example the article demonstrates how to integrate RDM into the research design as a complement of the classic quality control and assurance in empirical research that has, so far, generally been limited to data production.

Sharing and reuse of empirical data by scientists as well as thorough peer reviews of knowledge produced by empirical research requires that the problem of the research in question, the operationalized definitions of the objects of investigation and their representative selection are documented and archived as well as the methods of data production including indicators for data quality and all data collected and produced.

On this basis, the extent to which this complemented design of research processes has already been realized is demonstrated by research projects of the Chair of Landscape Ecology at the University of Vechta, Germany.

This study is part of a joined research project on Research Data Management funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

URL : Research Data Management as an Integral Part of the Research Process of Empirical Disciplines Using Landscape Ecology as an Example

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-026

Alter-Value in Data Reuse: Non-Designated Communities and Creative Processes

Author : Guillaume Boutard

This paper builds on the investigation of data reuse in creative processes to discuss ‘epistemic pluralism’ and data ‘alter-value’ in research data management. Focussing on a specific non-designated community, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five artists in relation to five works.

Data reuse is a critical component of all these works. The qualitative content analysis brings to light agonistic-antagonistic practices in data reuse and shows multiple deconstructions of the notion of data value as it is portrayed in the data reuse literature.

Finally, the paper brings to light the benefits of including such practices in the conceptualization of data curation.

URL : Alter-Value in Data Reuse: Non-Designated Communities and Creative Processes

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-023

Measuring and Mapping Data Reuse: Findings From an Interactive Workshop on Data Citation and Metrics for Data Reuse

Author : Lisa Federer

Widely adopted standards for data citation are foundational to efforts to track and quantify data reuse. Without the means to track data reuse and metrics to measure its impact, it is difficult to reward researchers who share high-value data with meaningful credit for their contribution.

Despite initial work on developing guidelines for data citation and metrics, standards have not yet been universally adopted. This article reports on the recommendations collected from a workshop held at the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship (FORCE11) 2018 meeting titled Measuring and Mapping Data Reuse: An Interactive Workshop on Metrics for Data.

A range of stakeholders were represented among the participants, including publishers, researchers, funders, repository administrators, librarians, and others.

Collectively, they generated a set of 68 recommendations for specific actions that could be taken by standards and metrics creators; publishers; repositories; funders and institutions; creators of reference management software and citation styles; and researchers, students, and librarians.

These specific, concrete, and actionable recommendations would help facilitate broader adoption of standard citation mechanisms and easier measurement of data reuse.

URL : Measuring and Mapping Data Reuse: Findings From an Interactive Workshop on Data Citation and Metrics for Data Reuse

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.ccd17b00

The Heritage Data Reuse Charter: from principles to research workflows

Authors : Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Laurent Romary

There is a growing need to establish domain-or discipline-specific approaches to research data sharing workflows. A defining feature of data and data workflows in the arts and humanities domain is their dependence on cultural heritage sources hosted and curated in museums, libraries, galleries and archives.

A major difficulty when scholars interact with heritage data is that the nature of the cooperation between researchers and Cultural Heritage Institutions (henceforth CHIs) is often constrained by structural and legal challenges but even more by uncertainties as to the expectations of both parties.

The Heritage Data Reuse Charter aims to address these by designing a common environment that will enable all the relevant actors to work together to connect and improve access to heritage data and make transactions related to the scholarly use of cultural heritage data more visible and transparent.

As a first step, a wide range of stakeholders on the Cultural Heritage and research sector agreed upon a set of generic principles, summarized in the Mission Statement of the Charter, that can serve as a baseline governing the interactions between CHIs, researchers and data centres.

This was followed by a long and thorough validation process related to these principles through surveys 1 and workshops 2. As a second step, we now put forward a questionnaire template tool that helps researchers and CHIs to translate the 6 core principles into specific research project settings.

It contains questions about access to data, provenance information, preferred citation standards, hosting responsibilities etc. on the basis of which the parties can arrive at mutual reuse agreements that could serve as a starting point for a FAIR-by-construction data management, right from the project planning/application phase.

The questionnaire template and the resulting mutual agreements can be flexibly applied to projects of different scale and in platform-independent ways. Institutions can embed them into their own exchange protocols while researchers can add them to their Data Management Plans.

As such, they can show evidence for responsible and fair conduct of cultural heritage data, and fair (but also FAIR) research data management practices that are based on partnership with the holding institution.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02475692

Resurfacing Historical Scientific Data: A Case Study Involving Fruit Breeding Data

Authors : Shannon L. Farrell, Lois G. Hendrickson, Kristen L. Mastel, Katherine Adina Allen, Julia A. Kelly

Objective

The objective of this paper is to illustrate the importance and complexities of working with historical analog data that exists on university campuses. Using a case study of fruit breeding data, we highlight issues and opportunities for librarians to help preserve and increase access to potentially valuable data sets.

Methods

We worked in conjunction with researchers to inventory, describe, and increase access to a large, 100-year-old data set of analog fruit breeding data. This involved creating a spreadsheet to capture metadata about each data set, identifying data sets at risk for loss, and digitizing select items for deposit in our institutional repository.

Results/Discussion

We illustrate that large amounts of data exist within biological and agricultural sciences departments and labs, and how past practices of data collection, record keeping, storage, and management have hindered data reuse.

We demonstrate that librarians have a role in collaborating with researchers and providing direction in how to preserve analog data and make it available for reuse. This work may provide guidance for other science librarians pursing similar projects.

Conclusions

This case study demonstrates how science librarians can build or strengthen their role in managing and providing access to analog data by combining their data management skills with researchers’ needs to recover and reuse data.

URL : Resurfacing Historical Scientific Data: A Case Study Involving Fruit Breeding Data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2019.1171

Playing Well on the Data FAIRground: Initiatives and Infrastructure in Research Data Management

Authors : Danielle Descoteaux, Chiara Farinelli, Marina Soares e Silva, Anita de Waard

Over the past five years, Elsevier has focused on implementing FAIR and best practices in data management, from data preservation through reuse. In this paper we describe a series of efforts undertaken in this time to support proper data management practices.

In particular, we discuss our journal data policies and their implementation, the current status and future goals for the research data management platform Mendeley Data, and clear and persistent linkages to individual data sets stored on external data repositories from corresponding published papers through partnership with Scholix.

Early analysis of our data policies implementation confirms significant disparities at the subject level regarding data sharing practices, with most uptake within disciplines of Physical Sciences. Future directions at Elsevier include implementing better discoverability of linked data within an article and incorporating research data usage metrics.

URL : Playing Well on the Data FAIRground: Initiatives and Infrastructure in Research Data Management

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00020