DataCite Summer Meeting June 2012

Sand castles by experts in Copenhagen

This is the last one of these posts - as it's the end of my notes from the Talinn/Copenhagen trip. Unfortunately it wasn't the last of the meetings I had to go to; the final one was a CODATA working group on data citation report drafting meeting, which doesn't have any presentation notes, but meant I missed the second half of the DataCite meeting.

Anyway, notes from the DataCite Summer Meeting presentations I did get to see are below:

NordBib conference notes, Copenhagen, June 2012

Inside the lecture theatre at the Black Diamond

The NordBib conference was all about Structural Frameworks for Open Digital Research
- Strategy, Policy & Infrastructure. I kind of fell into attending it by accident, as I was in Copenhagen for the OpenAIREplus workshop before it, and the DataCite meeting after it, so it seemed sensible to go to this one too.

It was an interesting conference, on one hand very high level, EU strategising, while on the other, the audience seemed to mainly consist of librarians and people interested in data without that much by way of actual concrete experience in data management. So I wound up having lots of conversations with lots of people, all interested in finding out what we in the UK and the NERC data centres have been up to.

All the presentations from the conference are available here (which kind of make my notes redundant, but nevermind!)

OpenAIREplus workshop - notes from the breakout session

One of Copenhagen's bridges being opened, so we can sail through!

1. Funders and data policy
 * Lots of interest in the data value checklist - compare UK and Australian data value checklist
 * It's cheaper to keep data rather than recreate it
 * Can you require open availability of data brought into a project? Case by case negotiation
 * Multiple funders - which data policy will be applied?
 * CODATA preparing a toolkit for funders about open data policy
 * Role of institutional repositories? Data centres are good places to handle data pools
 * Need clear metadata!
 * How to handle data management plans once the project is over? Fund data management post-project. Should remain institutional responsibility.
 * Identifiers - need researcher identifiers, funder acknowledgements, DOIs - all to pull together project information and data
 * Are there international approached in data management plans?

2. Institutional policy
 * Most institutions don't have a policy yet because they're not easy to create
 * What other steps need to be done before policy?
 * Hierarchy - who to get involved - academic champions
 * Broad overview - what are the needs of researchers -  don't want extra admin
 * Don't contradict other policies or legislation
 * Smaller institutions don't have monet or effort to get into big data infrastructures
 * policy can guide researchers on what to do with their data
 * What should be deposited, what should be kept
 * How can we help insitutions develop data management plans?
 * Guidelines on developing data management policies
 * What kind of questions do we need to know before drafting policy?

3. Researchers and publishers
 * Current examples are life and environmental sciences
 * we need other examples in other fiels
 * Researchers need acknowledgement for their work on data - not having it stops them shring
 * Quality issues are important - need principles for peer review of research data
 * Users of data are candidates to review it
 * there are varying degrees of openness in peer-review - which will be appropriate for data?
 * What stopes researchers sharing data? Quality, promotion, confidence in the value of the data
 * We can give researchers more confidence in their data by promoting community standards
 * Change beahviour so that data management is done every day, instead of just at the beginning and end of the project.
 * Publishers can influence researchers when it comes to data management.
 * Metrics are needed, data citation, but also alt.metrics
 * Need for good examples of data management to educate researchers
 * Need a list of trusted databases/repositories
 * URLs aren't trusted, because they break!

4. Technical
 * Finland is constructing a national data catalogue, containing a mix of metadata records and data
 * OpenAIRE data model and services are using trust levels for entities and (automatic and man-made) relations
 * Need to guarantee long term data availability for enhanced publications to be trustworthy, or at least know what bits will last for how long
 * Level of trust needed to develop services to show levels of preservation
 * Services should still exist for low trust objects - e.g.g use a robot to check if the object is still there, and if not, drop the connection.

5. OpenAIREplus
 * Are there licensing restrictions for metadata?
 * Case studies of scientific communities should be published as soon as possible
 * Credit for researchers is important
 * Libraries have a role too - even if there is a fear of data management
 * Universities are very disparate - makes it hard politically to agree on data policy.

OpenAIREplus workshop notes - 11th June 2012, Copenhagen

The Black Diamond from the water - not a bad little conference venue!

“Linking Open Access publications to data – policy development and implementation"

The next stop in my marathon run of conferences/workshops/meetings was Copenhagen, and the Black Diamond, the home of the Royal Library of Denmark for the OpenAIREplus workshop and the Nordbib conference (more on that in a later post).

This post contains my notes from the presentations given as part of the OpenAIREplus workshop, and boy, they crammed a lot in there! Some really fascinating talks, and my only complaint would be that we didn't have enough time in the breakout sessions to really get into the meat of things. But given that we'd started at 8.30am, I'm not sure where we could have found any more time!

(Insert usual disclaimer about notes here...)

Some notes from "Editing in the Digital World: 11th EASE General Assembly and Conference"

A friendly face at Tallinn Technical University

I was invited to Tallinn to talk at the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) General Assembly and Conference, "Editing in the Digital World", to present in their session about "Publishing Data". I was very pleasantly surprised by how much interest the delegates had in this particular subject - in fact we had to move rooms for the session, as the first room was too small!

Unfortunately, I couldn't make notes of the session I was presenting in, and was only around for a couple of keynotes (as I had to head off to Copenhagen for yet more meetings - see future blog posts coming soon!). I did manage to take notes for the keynotes I was around for, and here they are, for your reading pleasure.

(As always, these are notes, so all errors grammatical, factual, spelling and otherwise are mine! No warranty is given, etc. etc. etc.)

The slides from my presentation can be found here.