Establishing an early indicator for data sharing and reuse

Authors : Agata Piękniewska, Laurel L. Haak, Darla Henderson, Katherine McNeill, Anita Bandrowski, Yvette Seger

Funders, publishers, scholarly societies, universities, and other stakeholders need to be able to track the impact of programs and policies designed to advance data sharing and reuse. With the launch of the NIH data management and sharing policy in 2023, establishing a pre-policy baseline of sharing and reuse activity is critical for the biological and biomedical community.

Toward this goal, we tested the utility of mentions of research resources, databases, and repositories (RDRs) as a proxy measurement of data sharing and reuse. We captured and processed text from Methods sections of open access biological and biomedical research articles published in 2020 and 2021 and made available in PubMed Central.

We used natural language processing to identify text strings to measure RDR mentions. In this article, we demonstrate our methodology, provide normalized baseline data sharing and reuse activity in this community, and highlight actions authors and publishers can take to encourage data sharing and reuse practices.

URL : Establishing an early indicator for data sharing and reuse

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1586

Using ORCID, DOI, and Other Open Identifiers in Research Evaluation

Authors : Laurel L. Haak, Alice Meadows, Josh Brown

An evaluator’s task is to connect the dots between program goals and its outcomes. This can be accomplished through surveys, research, and interviews, and is frequently performed post hoc.

Research evaluation is hampered by a lack of data that clearly connect a research program with its outcomes and, in particular, by ambiguity about who has participated in the program and what contributions they have made. Manually making these connections is very labor-intensive, and algorithmic matching introduces errors and assumptions that can distort results.

In this paper, we discuss the use of identifiers in research evaluation—for individuals, their contributions, and the organizations that sponsor them and fund their work. Global identifier systems are uniquely positioned to capture global mobility and collaboration.

By leveraging connections between local infrastructures and global information resources, evaluators can map data sources that were previously either unavailable or prohibitively labor-intensive.

We describe how identifiers, such as ORCID iDs and DOIs, are being embedded in research workflows across science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics; how this is affecting data availability for evaluation purposes: and provide examples of evaluations that are leveraging identifiers.

We also discuss the importance of provenance and preservation in establishing confidence in the reliability and trustworthiness of data and relationships, and in the long-term availability of metadata describing objects and their inter-relationships.

We conclude with a discussion on opportunities and risks for the use of identifiers in evaluation processes.

URL : Using ORCID, DOI, and Other Open Identifiers in Research Evaluation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2018.00028