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Open Data Maturity in Europe 2016 : Insights into the European state of play

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Authors : Wendy Carrara, Margriet Nieuwenhuis, Heleen Vollers

This report is the second in a series of annual studies and explores the level of Open Data Maturity in the EU28 and Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein – referred to as EU28+. The measurement is built on two key indicators Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity, thereby covering the level of development of national activities promoting Open Data as well as the level of development of national portals.

In 2016, with a 28.6% increase compared to 2015, the EU28+ countries completed over 55% of their Open Data journey showing that, by 2016, a majority of the EU28+ countries have successfully developed a basic approach to address Open Data.

The Portal Maturity level increased by 22.6 percentage points from 41.7% to 64.3% thanks to the development of more advanced features on country data portals. The overall Open Data Maturity groups countries into different clusters: Beginners, Followers, Fast Trackers and Trend Setters.

Barriers do remain to move Open Data forward. The report concludes on a series of recommendations, providing countries with guidance to further improve Open Data maturity.

Countries need to raise more (political) awareness around Open Data, increase automated processes on their portals to increase usability and re-usability of data, and organise more events and trainings to support both local and national initiatives.

URL : Open Data Maturity in Europe 2016 : Insights into the European state of play

Alternative location : https://www.europeandataportal.eu/sites/default/files/edp_landscaping_insight_report_n2_2016.pdf

Setting up a National Research Data Curation Service for Qatar: Challenges and Opportunities

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Authors : Arif Shaon, Armin Straube, Krishna Roy Chowdhury

Over the past decade, Qatar has been making considerable progress towards developing a sustainable research culture for the nation. The main driver behind Qatar’s progress in research and innovation is Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development (QF), a private, non-profit organization that aims to utilise research as a catalyst for expanding, diversifying and improving the country’s economy, health and environment.

While this has resulted in a significant growth in the number of research publications produced by Qatari researchers in recent years, a nationally co-ordinated approach is needed to address some of the emerging but increasingly important aspects of research data curation, such as management and publication of research data as important outputs, and their long-term digital preservation.

Qatar National Library (QNL), launched in November 2012 under the umbrella of QF, aims to establish itself as a centre of excellence in Qatar for research data management, curation and publishing to address the research data-related needs of Qatari researchers and academics.

This paper describes QNL’s approach towards establishing a national research data curation service for Qatar, highlighting the associated opportunities and key challenges.

URL : Setting up a National Research Data Curation Service for Qatar: Challenges and Opportunities

Alternative location : http://www.ijdc.net/article/view/515

Openness as Tool for Acceleration and Measurement: Reflections on Problem Representations Underpinning Open Access and Open Science

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Author : Jutta Haider

Increasingly open access emerges as an issue that researchers, universities, and various infrastructure providers, such as libraries and academic publishers, have to relate to. Commonly policies requiring open access are framed as expanding access to information and hence as being part of a democratization of society and knowledge production processes.

However, there are also other aspects that are part of the way in which open access is commonly imagined in the various policy documents, declarations, and institutional demands that often go unnoticed.

This essay wants to foreground some of these issues by asking the overarching question: “What is the problem that open access is seen to solve represented to be?” The paper will discuss how demands to open up access to research align also with an administrative enclosure and managerial processes of control and evaluation.

It will show that while demands for free and open access to research publications – created or compiled in research processes funded by public money – are seen as contributing to the knowledge base for advancing society for a common good and in that sense framed as part of a liberating discourse, these demands are also expression of a shift of control of the science community to invisible research infrastructures and to an apparatus of administration as well as subscribing to an ideal of entrepreneurialism as well as continuing a problematic and much criticized understanding of Western science as universal.

URL : http://lup.lub.lu.se/record/070c067e-5675-455e-a4b2-81f82b6c75a7

Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community

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Authors : Megan Taylor, Kathrine S. H. Jensen

In this paper we explore how the development of The University of Huddersfield Press, a publisher of open access scholarly journals and monographs, has enabled the sharing of research with a wider online audience.

We situate the development of the Press within a wider research environment and growing community of New University Presses (NUPs) where there is an increasing demand for demonstrating research impact, which drives the need for improved analysis and reporting of impact data, a task that often falls within the remit of library and academic support services.

We detail the benefits of the University Press Manager role in terms of ensuring professional service that delivers consistency and sustainability. We go on to outline the experiences of engaging with different online spaces and detail the extensive support for student authors.

We argue that in order for the Press to support building a strong and engaged scholarly community and provide new spaces for emerging research, continued investment in both platform development and infrastructure is required.

URL : Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/6/2/13

Understanding and supporting researchers’ choices in sharing their publications: the launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF

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Author : Charlie Rapple

Researchers have for many years had access to new platforms and channels for networking and sharing resources, but the pace of growth in their usage of these networks has substantially increased recently.

This has led to full-text sharing on a scale that concerns publishers and libraries, because of the proportion of such sharing that infringes copyright. This article summarizes key findings of a 2017 survey that explored researchers’ awareness of and behaviours in relation to scholarly collaboration networks and other emerging mechanisms for discovering and gaining access to content, along with their views on copyright.

The article also describes ‘Shareable PDF’, a new approach to PDF-based sharing that better enables such sharing to be measured and contextualized, and which has recently been successfully launched with authors and readers.

URL : Understanding and supporting researchers’ choices in sharing their publications: the launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.408

The State of Assessing Data Stewardship Maturity – An Overview

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Author : Ge Peng

Data stewardship encompasses all activities that preserve and improve the information content, accessibility, and usability of data and metadata. Recent regulations, mandates, policies, and guidelines set forth by the U.S. government, federal other, and funding agencies, scientific societies and scholarly publishers, have levied stewardship requirements on digital scientific data.

This elevated level of requirements has increased the need for a formal approach to stewardship activities that supports compliance verification and reporting. Meeting or verifying compliance with stewardship requirements requires assessing the current state, identifying gaps, and, if necessary, defining a roadmap for improvement.

This, however, touches on standards and best practices in multiple knowledge domains. Therefore, data stewardship practitioners, especially these at data repositories or data service centers or associated with data stewardship programs, can benefit from knowledge of existing maturity assessment models.

This article provides an overview of the current state of assessing stewardship maturity for federally funded digital scientific data. A brief description of existing maturity assessment models and related application(s) is provided.

This helps stewardship practitioners to readily obtain basic information about these models. It allows them to evaluate each model’s suitability for their unique verification and improvement needs.

URL : The State of Assessing Data Stewardship Maturity – An Overview

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2018-007