Issues in the development of open access to research data

This paper explores key issues in the development of open access to research data. The use of digital means for developing, storing and manipulating data is creating a focus on ‘data-driven science’. One aspect of this focus is the development of ‘open access’ to research data.

Open access to research data refers to the way in which various types of data are openly available to public and private stakeholders, user communities and citizens. Open access to research data, however, involves more than simply providing easier and wider access to data for potential user groups. The development of open access requires attention to the ways data are considered in different areas of research.

We identify how open access is being unevenly developed across the research environment and the consequences this has in terms of generating data gaps. Data gaps refer to the way data becomes detached from published conclusions. To address these issues, we examine four main areas in developing open access to research data: stakeholder roles and values; technological requirements for managing and sharing data; legal and ethical regulations and procedures; institutional roles and policy frameworks.

We conclude that problems of variability and consistency across the open access ecosystem need to be addressed within and between these areas to ensure that risks surrounding a data gap are managed in open access.

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2014.956505

Towards an Interoperable Digital Scholarly Edition

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“Recent proposals for creating digital scholarly editions (DSEs) through the crowdsourcing of transcriptions and collaborative scholarship, for the establishment of national repositories of digital humanities data, and for the referencing, sharing, and storage of DSEs, have underlined the need for greater data interoperability. The TEI Guidelines have tried to establish standards for encoding transcriptions since 1988. However, because the choice of tags is guided by human interpretation, TEI-XML encoded files are in general not interoperable. One way to fix this problem may be to break down the current all-in-one approach to encoding so that DSEs can be specified instead by a bundle of separate resources that together offer greater interoperability: plain text versions, markup, annotations, and metadata. This would facilitate not only the development of more general software for handling DSEs, but also enable existing programs that already handle these kinds of data to function more efficiently.”

URL : Towards an Interoperable Digital Scholarly Edition

DOI : 10.4000/jtei.979

Model for democratisation of the contents hosted in MOOCs

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“Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a new educational tool in higher education, based on gratuity, massiveness and ubiquity. Essentially they suggest an evolution of the Open Learning Movement based on principles of reusing, revising, remixing and redistributing open educational resources (OER). However, in contrast with the content of OERs, content hosed in MOOCs tends to be paywalled and copyrighted, which restricts its reuse. Philosophically, the main problem with MOOCs is the inaccessibility and inadaptability of their resources, challenging democratic open access to knowledge. A number of authors and organisations consider it an ultimate necessity to open up MOOC resources. Therefore in this paper three strategies to open up MOOC contents are proposed: to deposit the materials in repositories of OER (ROER) as individual objects, to archive them in ROER in data packages as learning units or to convert them into OpenCourseWare (OCW) as self-taught courses.”

URL : Model for democratisation of the contents hosted in MOOCs

doi http://dx.doi.org/10.7238/rusc.v12i1.2031

Comparative analysis of public policies in open access models in Latin America. Brazil and Argentina cases

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“This article presents public policies for open access models in Argentina and Brazil, two countries that have pioneered the subject in Latin America. The methodology used is comparative documentation, whereby the legal and political frameworks of open access systems are contrasted, paying special attention to the education, science, culture and government sectors. The main conclusion is that, in spite of technological and legal difficulties, public policies provide accessible information and quality knowledge.”

URL : Comparative analysis of public policies in open access models in Latin America. Brazil and Argentina cases

doi http://doi.dx.org/10.7238/rusc.v12i1.1947

Publishing without Publishers: a Decentralized Approach to Dissemination, Retrieval, and Archiving of Data

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“Making available and archiving scientific results is for the most part still considered the task of classical publishing companies, despite the fact that classical forms of publishing centered around printed narrative articles no longer seem well-suited in the digital age. In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. Here we propose to design scientific data publishing as a Web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies. We present a protocol and a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data with formal semantics. We show how this approach allows researchers to produce, publish, retrieve, address, verify, and recombine datasets and their individual nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and we argue that this architecture could be used for the Semantic Web in general. Our evaluation of the current small network shows that this system is efficient and reliable, and we discuss how it could grow to handle the large amounts of structured data that modern science is producing and consuming.”

URL : http://arxiv-web3.library.cornell.edu/abs/1411.2749

Les dispositifs mobiles de lecture numérique dans les bibliothèques suisses

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“Ce travail a pour objectifs de faire une revue de la littérature sur l’usage des dispositifs mobiles de lecture numérique en bibliothèque et de dresser un panorama de la situation en Suisse.

Le nombre de bibliothèques proposant du numérique varie beaucoup d’un pays à l’autre. Malgré tout, les bibliothèques commencent à s’organiser entre elles pour créer des plateformes ou des consortiums afin de faciliter leur accès aux documents numériques. Mais la route est encore longue. L’offre de titres numériques à destination des bibliothèques est très spartiate et celles-ci ont un pouvoir de négociation relativement faible, tout en étant fortement concurrencées par les grands distributeurs.

En ce qui concerne les dispositifs mobiles, on constate que liseuses et les tablettes sont deux supports d’accès à la lecture numérique qui ont leurs spécificités et ne conviennent donc pas nécessairement au même type d’utilisation.

En matière de prêt de ces dispositifs mobiles, les initiatives se multiplient dans les bibliothèques à travers le monde. Dans beaucoup de pays, aider les bibliothèques à proposer ces supports semble être une étape normale en vue de diminuer la fracture numérique. Si ce n’est pas toujours le cas pour tous les types de bibliothèques, ça l’est bien souvent pour les établissements universitaires.

En ce qui concerne les problématiques liées aux aspects juridiques du livre numérique, ce sont les mêmes partout, la Suisse ne fait pas exception. Elles prennent d’ailleurs tellement de place qu’en matière de prêt de dispositifs mobiles, les décisions manquent clairement.

Notre enquête, qui réunit les réponses de plus de 150 bibliothèques montre que les expériences menées sont très inégales. Elle met aussi en avant les raisons qui poussent les bibliothèques à adopter ou non le prêt de dispositif mobile comme nouveau service. On constate également que les échanges entre bibliothèques ne sont pas fréquents, que l’adoption d’un tel service n’est pas toujours facile, que les expériences ne sont pas toujours vécues de la même manière. Même lorsqu’elle semble menée de la même façon, la perception des bibliothécaires et des usagers peut différer. Quoi qu’il en soit, le bibliothécaire reste un élément central et irremplaçable même dans un monde plus numérisé.

Cette enquête nous a permis de créer une carte en ligne des bibliothèques suisses prêtant des dispositifs mobiles de lecture numérique. Inspirée de l’exemple français, elle est un outil de mise en réseau entre les bibliothèques intéressées à partager ou à s’inspirer des expériences faites. Plus de concertation et une meilleure visibilité permettraient à ces expériences de s’enrichir les unes des autres.”

URL : http://doc.rero.ch/record/209602

Are there birds in the library? The extent of Twitter adoption and use by Canadian academic libraries

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“Twitter, only eight years old, has emerged as an ever-present component of our everyday, online lives. This phenomenon is apparent in academic libraries as well, with a growing body of published reports on how libraries use Twitter, and other social networking tools, to engage with users. The extent of this adoption by libraries, however, is assumed rather than known, leading to the question: is it really a phenomenon? How many academic libraries are actually currently tweeting? In this paper, we report an investigation of Twitter adoption by Canadian academic libraries. We found that less than half of the main libraries currently tweet, with adoption peaking in 2009. While tweeting is not as ubiquitous as may be assumed and recent adoption has declined, findings do show that tweeting remains consistent and active for those libraries with established Twitter accounts.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4945