« 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. »
Étiquette : research data
« This article discusses the drivers behind the formation of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), its current state, the lessons learned from its first full year of operation, and its anticipated impact on data publishing and sharing. One of the pressing challenges in data infrastructure (taken here to include issues relating to hardware, software and content format, as well as human actors) is how best to enable data interoperability across boundaries. This is particularly critical as the world deals with bigger and more complex problems that require data and insights from a range of disciplines. The RDA has been set up to enable more data to be shared across barriers to address these challenges. It does this through focused Working Groups and Interest Groups, formed of experts from around the world, and drawing from the academic, industry, and government sectors. »
« This article sets the scene for the special issue on research data and publishing. Research data – that material commonly accepted by the scholarly community as required evidence for hypotheses and insights, for verification and/or reproducibility of experiments – has become an increasingly critical issue for publishers given recent developments in funders’ mandates, technological advances, policymakers’ interests, and so forth. I outline some of the recent initiatives that are responding to policy directives, particularly Project ODE, and consider how publishers are working with data and integrating their practices with other collaborative efforts. A summary of the new policies, products, and partnerships demonstrates that the onus is now with scholarly publishers to gain an understanding of these developments and how they are affecting fellow key stakeholders within the research communications ecosystem. »
« A growing number of funding agencies and international scholarly organizations are requesting that research data be made more openly available to help validate and advance scientific research. Thus, this is an opportune moment for research data repositories to partner with journal editors and publishers in order to simplify and improve data curation and publishing practices. One practical example of this type of cooperation is currently being facilitated by a two year (2012-2014) one million dollar Sloan Foundation grant, integrating two well-established open source systems: the Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) Open Journal Systems (OJS), developed by Stanford University and Simon Fraser University; and Harvard University’s Dataverse Network web application, developed by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). To help make this interoperability possible, an OJS Dataverse plugin and Data Deposit API are being developed, which together will allow authors to submit their articles and datasets through an existing journal management interface, while the underlying data are seamlessly deposited into a research data repository, such as the Harvard Dataverse. This practice paper will provide an overview of the project, and a brief exploration of some of the specific challenges to and advantages of this integration. »
URL : Building a Bridge Between Journal Articles and Research Data
Alternative URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/9.1.176
« This article provides a selection of examples of the many ways that a link can be made between a journal article (whether in a data journal or otherwise) and a dataset held in a data repository. In some cases the method of linking is well established, while in others, they have yet to be rolled out uniformly across the journal landscape. We explore ways in which these examples might be implemented in a data journal, such as Geoscience Data Journal, as explored by the PREPARDE project. »
URL : Cross-Linking Between Journal Publications and Data Repositories
Alternative URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/9.1.164
« This document summarises guidelines produced by the UK Jisc-funded PREPARDE data publication project on the key issues of repository accreditation. It aims to lay out the principles and the requirements for data repositories intent on providing a dataset as part of the research record and as part of a research publication. The data publication requirements that repository accreditation may support are rapidly changing, hence this paper is intended as a provocation for further discussion and development in the future. »
URL : Guidelines on Recommending Data Repositories as Partners in Publishing Research Data
Alternative URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/9.1.152
« We present a case study of data integration and reuse involving 12 researchers who published datasets in Open Context, an online data publishing platform, as part of collaborative archaeological research on early domesticated animals in Anatolia. Our discussion reports on how different editorial and collaborative review processes improved data documentation and quality, and created ontology annotations needed for comparative analyses by domain specialists. To prepare data for shared analysis, this project adapted editor-supervised review and revision processes familiar to conventional publishing, as well as more novel models of revision adapted from open source software development of public version control. Preparing the datasets for publication and analysis required significant investment of effort and expertise, including archaeological domain knowledge and familiarity with key ontologies. To organize this work effectively, we emphasized these different models of collaboration at various stages of this data publication and analysis project. Collaboration first centered on data editors working with data contributors, then widened to include other researchers who provided additional peer-review feedback, and finally the widest research community, whose collaboration is facilitated by GitHub’s version control system. We demonstrate that the “publish” and “push” models of data dissemination need not be mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they can play complementary roles in sharing high quality data in support of research. This work highlights the value of combining multiple models in different stages of data dissemination. »
URL : Publishing and Pushing: Mixing Models for Communicating Research Data in Archaeology
Alternative URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/9.1.57