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Research Data Services in Academic Libraries: Data Intensive Roles for the Future?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Objectives

The primary objectives of this study are to gauge the various levels of Research Data Service academic libraries provide based on demographic factors, gauging RDS growth since 2011, and what obstacles may prevent expansion or growth of services.

Methods

Survey of academic institutions through stratified random sample of ACRL library directors across the U.S. and Canada. Frequencies and chi-square analysis were applied, with some responses grouped into broader categories for analysis.

Results

Minimal to no change for what services were offered between survey years, and interviews with library directors were conducted to help explain this lack of change.

Conclusion

Further analysis is forthcoming for a librarians study to help explain possible discrepancies in organizational objectives and librarian sentiments of RDS.

URL : Research Data Services in Academic Libraries: Data Intensive Roles for the Future?

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2015.1085

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Research data management services in academic research libraries and perceptions of librarians

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The emergence of data intensive science and the establishment of data management mandates have motivated academic libraries to develop research data services (RDS) for their faculty and students. Here the results of two studies are reported: librarians’ RDS practices in U.S. and Canadian academic research libraries, and the RDS-related library policies in those or similar libraries. Results show that RDS are currently not frequently employed in libraries, but many services are in the planning stages.

Technical RDS are less common than informational RDS, RDS are performed more often for faculty than for students, and more library directors believe they offer opportunities for staff to develop RDS-related skills than the percentage of librarians who perceive such opportunities to be available. Librarians need opportunities to learn more about these services either on campus or through attendance at workshops and professional conferences.

URL : Research data management services in academic research libraries and perceptions of librarians

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2013.11.003

 

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University-based open access publishing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

This report, prepared for SPARC Europe, sketches the landscape of university-­‐based not-­‐for-­‐ profit publishing in Europe with a primary focus on open access publishing of journals. It provides a view of the different types of initiatives in terms of their size, operational and business models, technologies used, stakeholder involvement, concentration of scientific fields, growth, as well as regional characteristics and recommendations for SPARC Europe and DOAJ.

The report attests to a rich and continuously evolving ecology of open access publishing initiatives in universities in Europe and elsewhere. Beyond the commercial publishing models, it appears that university libraries are largely the foci of intense activity in journal publishing and books (primarily where a university press exists), while national governments are moving towards building national collections, national portals and services paid for by public funds to make research published within the country more relevant and accessible internationally.

This ecology is primarily populated by small publishers who are largely invisible, and much smaller numbers of large and medium-­‐ sized university-­‐based activities. At the same time, a growing number of innovative initiatives in the University and outside, mostly initiated by scholars and University Presses, eager to experiment in developing a fair and sustainable scholarly communications system, attests to a vibrant and swiftly-­‐evolving landscape.

URL : University-based open access publishing

Alternative location : http://sparceurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/SE_UPublishing_Report_0315.pdf

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Why scientific publications should be anonymous

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Numerous studies have revealed biases within the scientific communication system and across all scientific fields. For example, already prominent researchers receive disproportional credit compared to their (almost) equally qualified colleagues — because of their prominence. However, none of those studies has offered a solution as to how to decrease the incidence of these biases. In this paper I argue that by publishing anonymously, we can decrease the incidence of inaccurate heuristics in the current scientific communication system. Specific suggestions are made as to how to implement the changes.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05382

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Researchers and Their Data : Results of an Austrian Survey

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

This report provides an overview of the Austria-wide survey for research data, which was carried out within the framework of the project e-Infrastructures Austria at the beginning of 2015. This survey was directed at the arts, humanities and sciences staff of all 21 public universities and three extramural research institutions in Austria.

The participants were asked about the following topics :

  • Data types and formats
  • Data archiving, backup and loss
  • Ethical and legal aspects
  • Accessibility and subsequent use
  • Infrastructure and services

This first inquiry conducted at a national level in this context, facilitates the collection of methods for the practical handling of research data in Austria, and is therefore the basis (1) for an on-going effort to optimize infrastructure, (2) for an adaptation of the services provided, as well as (3) for a reorientation of the identification method for resources in this strategic area, which correspond to the expressed needs of people in the research process.

URL : Researchers and Their Data : Results of an Austrian Survey

Alternative location : https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:409318/bdef:Content/get

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Wikipedia: the difference between information acquisition and learning knowledge

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

This paper attempts to define Wikipedia in an information literacy context by providing an analysis of learning knowledge and Wikipedia’s structure. The distribution of learning in the digital information age is a core topic for scholarly communication. It is highly relevant to students, citizens and instructors in their roles as users of content and as creators of content.

Even though it appears to be far removed from traditional publishing in the print world, many students, citizens and instructors use digital information tools to share aspects of their works in a way that is defined as publishing. Understanding the difference between information acquisition and learning knowledge are essential in educational settings.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4875

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Semantic representation of scientific literature: bringing claims, contributions and named entities onto the Linked Open Data cloud

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Motivation

Finding relevant scientific literature is one of the essential tasks researchers are facing on a daily basis. Digital libraries and web information retrieval techniques provide rapid access to a vast amount of scientific literature. However, no further automated support is available that would enable fine-grained access to the knowledge ‘stored’ in these documents. The emerging domain of Semantic Publishing aims at making scientific knowledge accessible to both humans and machines, by adding semantic annotations to content, such as a publication’s contributions, methods, or application domains.

However, despite the promises of better knowledge access, the manual annotation of existing research literature is prohibitively expensive for wide-spread adoption. We argue that a novel combination of three distinct methods can significantly advance this vision in a fully-automated way: (i) Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Rhetorical Entity (RE) detection; (ii) Named Entity (NE) recognition based on the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud; and (iii) automatic knowledge base construction for both NEs and REs using semantic web ontologies that interconnect entities in documents with the machine-readable LOD cloud.

Results

We present a complete workflow to transform scientific literature into a semantic knowledge base, based on the W3C standards RDF and RDFS. A text mining pipeline, implemented based on the GATE framework, automatically extracts rhetorical entities of type Claims and Contributions from full-text scientific literature. These REs are further enriched with named entities, represented as URIs to the linked open data cloud, by integrating the DBpedia Spotlight tool into our workflow.

Text mining results are stored in a knowledge base through a flexible export process that provides for a dynamic mapping of semantic annotations to LOD vocabularies through rules stored in the knowledge base. We created a gold standard corpus from computer science conference proceedings and journal articles, where Claim and Contribution sentences are manually annotated with their respective types using LOD URIs. The performance of the RE detection phase is evaluated against this corpus, where it achieves an average F-measure of 0.73. We further demonstrate a number of semantic queries that show how the generated knowledge base can provide support for numerous use cases in managing scientific literature.

URL : Semantic representation of scientific literature: bringing claims, contributions and named entities onto the Linked Open Data cloud

Alternative location : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.37