Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange (SONEX)

SONEX work on repository interoperability to be presented at the 2nd Open Access Forum

2012-02-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

The communication "The SONEX Workgroup for the Analysis of Repository Interoperability Issues: a Summary of Activities" (in Spanish) presented by the JISC-funded SONEX Workgroup has been accepted for the 2nd Open Access Forum to be held Apr 16-17th along the INFO2012 conference in Havana, Cuba. The motto for this 2nd Open Access Forum is "Interoperability: the Basis for the Ecology of Open Access Repositories".

The selected list of topics for the 2nd Open Access Forum includes:

Standards for Open Access Repository (OAR) Interoperability

CRIS/OAR Interoperability

Value-Added Services based on Repository Interoperability (such as Repository Usage Aggregation Systems)

Linked Data and Enriched Digital Objects

Integration of Repositories and Electronic Publishing Platforms

Semantic Interoperability

Interoperability between Open Access Repositories and e-Learning Platforms

Distributed Repository Networks

Report on the Knowledge Exchange Workshop on RDM released

2012-02-07T19:24:00.000-08:00

The report on the Workshop on Research Data Management held last November by Knowledge Exchange (KE) at the Wissenschaftszentrum Bonn has already been released. This report summarizes expert group discussions on RDM funding, training, infrastructure and organisation challenges held after the KE "A Surfboard for 'Riding the Wave'" report was presented at the Workshop.

Thematic parallel session on metadata - actions to be taken

2011-12-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

On Day II of the JISC MRD Programme 2011-13 launch event in Nottingham, last Dec 2nd, specific subject-based discussion sessions were held among the different JISCMRD02 Projects for research data management in order to promote synergies and joint work on common issues. This is a brief report on the outcomes of such discussions at the parallel session on metadata - some other were simultaneously held for Institutional, Life Sciences, Engineering or Archaeology MRD projects, whose discussions have been reported elsewhere (and there are also other posts summarizing talks for this one too).

It was really hard for some of us to pick a single of those groups, since many projects actually belonged to several strands (some lucky ones had also two representatives at the event, it should be noted). The session on metadata was attended, among others, by:

- Anna Clements (U St Andrews)
- Simon Kerridge (U Sunderland)
- Kevin Ginty (U Sunderland)
- Charlotte Pascoe (British Atmospheric Data Centre)
- Pablo de Castro (SONEX Workgroup)
- Simon Hodson (JISC MRD Programme manager)
- David Shotton (U Oxford)
- Louise Corti (UK Data Archive)
- Marco Fabiani (Queen Mary U London)
...

Discussion

Metadata standards were repeatedly discussed along the session - there was a joint (and unsuccessful) attempt to recall whether anyone knew about a metadata standard registry available for different disciplines. Representatives from CERIF4Datasets Project, University of Sunderland, mentioned they were using the MEDIN metadata standard for their work in marine sciences data management. The Core Scientific Metadata Model (CSMD) standard, developed at STFC for the I2S2 Project was also mentioned as an interesting approach to multi-disciplinary metadata standard for structural sciences such as Chemistry, Materials Sciences, Earth Sciences or Biochemistry. Finally, the PIMMS Project (BADC/U Reading), mentioned Metafor as a Climate Science metadata standard and their goal of using PIMMS software tool to generate CIM-based content.

At some point the idea catched up that metadata standards should perhaps be mandated by publishers in order to harmonise discipline-specific data description procedures. Publishers are actually involved in several very successful international RDM projects, such as Dryad, but -save for REWARD- are significantly missing in JISCMRD02 projects.

Having previously developed the Semantic Publishing and Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies, David Shotton said he was now working on their extension to CERIF-based metadata description of datasets, which is closely linked to dataset CERIFication work being carried out at the CERIF4Datasets Project.

Actions

The following actions were proposed for improving the chances of metadata standard harmonisation - hence enhancing dataset discoverability:

Trying to locate (or otherwise collect) an already existing registry of metadata standards for different disciplines, in order to offer researchers from a given discipline an already tested metadata schema they can re-use,

Mapping metadata standards to each other aiming to produce a minimum-sufficient-information metadata set that may be widely applicable accross disciplines,

Taking steps towards organising a workshop in order to have metadata issues discussed among relevant stakeholders. ANDS Metadata Workshop in 2010 might be a potential source of inspiration for this with all those discipline-based approaches to metadata standards. Proposed dates for this Metadata WS were spring-summer 2012.

Finally, there was a wrap-up by different subject-based project groups which showed strong possibilites for a more stable cooperation among them (Biomedical/Healthcare projects even discussed the possibiity of building a common wiki). Some cooperation frameworks (googlegroups, mailing lists) might be set for promoting this disciplinar trans-project collaboration. Regarding the metadata strand, it should be noted it was also an issue in discussions held at most subject-specific workgroups, so it would potentially allow contributions from all of them.

The dawn of a new JISC MRD programme - Day I

2011-12-02T01:26:00.001-08:00

After a successful first stage of the JISC Managing Research Data (MRD) Programme (2009-2011), a second phase of JISC MRD was launched yesterday at the NCSL Conference Centre in Nottingham, along a 2-day event that will continue today. JISC MRD02 Programme includes 27 projects classified in three different strands:

Strand A. Research Data Management Infrastructure: 17 projects, to be completed from Mar to Jul 2013, comprising Institutional Pilot projects, Institutional Embedding and Transition to Service projects, Disciplinary projects for creative arts and archaeology, and a Metadata project,

Strand B. RDM Planning: 8 projects running until Mar 2012, aiming to design and implement data management plans and supporting services for researchers,

Strand C. Enhancing DMPOnline projects: 2 projects, aiming to customize and enhance the DCC DMPOnline Tool to improve its interaction with institutional/ disciplinary information systems).

It is worth noting that a number of funded RDM projects along this 2nd programme stage are building upon previous pilot work (projects carried out along JISC MRD programme 2007-2011) in order to for instance extend and embed data management services accross the whole institution.

On describing the research data management programme, Simon Hodson, JISC MRD programme manager mentioned there will be two further JISC MRD calls as early as Jan 2012, dealing with:

- Research data publications, aiming to build partnerships among involved stakeholders and encouraging data citation and publication,

- RDM Train, aiming to design and implement data management training strategies for specific disciplines and support roles (including librarians), to be performed by linking to professional bodies.

Emphasis will also be made along this 2nd JISC MRD programme stage on evidence gahering for project benefits and impact. A session devoted to these issues will be held on Dec 2nd, with practical work with both the Benefits Framework Tool and the Value Chain Impacts Tool. Developing metrics for measuring project impact is a specific programme goal along this 2nd implementation stage.

Project blogging

Another JISCMRD02 main objective -and closely related to impact measurement- is promotion of project dissemination and interaction among themselves and with the broader community via blogging. A specific presentation on 'blogging practices to support project work' was delivered for the purpose by Brian Kelly, UKOLN. The presentation highlighted the relevance of publishing project blogposts as an alternative means of expression to writing research papers or code, and engaged the audience in finding shared views regarding potential benefits blogging may bring to RDM projects, also providing some useful technical advice along the way.

Subsequent discussion focused on pros and cons of blogging as a communication technique (both from regular bloggers' and researchers' viewpoint), as well as on potential advantages of JISCMRD project blog aggregation, with a common RSS feed embedded back into the JISC site.

Parallel sessions and poster-session networking

Two parallel sessions came afterwards, dealing with two principal RDM issues: a first one on DCC Tools, introducing Data Asset Framework (DAF), DMPOnline and CARDIO, and summarized by Paul Stainthorp, U Lincoln, on his JISCMRD02 Day I blogpost.

The 2nd parallel session dealt with UMF Tools and related RDM projects. This 2nd session featured presentations by John Milner on JANET Brokerage and Andy Powell on Eduserv Cloud Pilot, along which the strategy for Academic Cloud service implementation was described - based on the "work with the willing" driving line. The Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) -originally developed for utilities such as water or light- will be re-used as purchasing framework for cloud-related services. Regarding Eduserv, a 2-month 'introductory tier' will be available (just for institutions) along the service gradual implementation (storage being currently single-site, with no backups at this pilot stage, though there are plans for offering tape backup for part of the stored infrastructure).

After an interesting Q&A time, in which backup was suggested to be an absolute requirement for the success of the initiative and there were questions on various Eduserv use mode details (such as the possibility of using departmental orders/purchase order instead of credit cards for academic use), five projects from the UMF strand were briefly presented which are already working either based on a SaaS approach or in the cloud, or both: these were BRISSkit (Jonathan Tedds, U Leicester), DataFlow (David Shotton, U Oxford), Smart Research Framework (or ELB software as a service, Tim Parkinson, U Southampton), VIDaaS and YouShare Projects. Slides for these presentations will shortly be available and will be linked from here.

Finally, Day I official programme ended with a poster session and networking event, which meant a really good opportunity for RDM projects to interact with each other and with 'fellow travellers'. Synergies among projects became quite evident when having all them displayed together on a set of panels, and having their representatives available and willing to discuss each project aims, challenges and similarities to others offered a very good chance to get the general picture along with the details, as well as for establishing inter-project liasons that went well over closure time.

euroCRIS Membership Meeting – Autumn 2011, Lille, France

2011-11-06T21:43:00.000-08:00

On Nov 2-3 the autumn 2011 euroCRIS membership meeting was held at the University of Lille 3 in Lille, France. Attendees from 14 countries (13 European nations plus Canada) met for two days at the Univ-Lille3 Maison de Recherche for learning about the new CERIF 1.3 version (to be released Dec 2011) and the growing number of CERIF-based CRIS implementations in Europe, with a special focus on French ones (see event programme).

Brigitte Joerg, euroCRIS CERIF Task Group Leader and German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), delivered a CERIF v1.3 tutorial at the beginning of the membership meeting. After a general-purpose introduction to CERIF, CRIS Systems and the euroCRIS Group for first-time meeting attendees, the tutorial went into describing new features in the new CERIF 1.3 release (CERIF versions will no longer be named by their year of release as they were so far). Such features include the so-called Infrastructure entities (Facility, Equipment, Service) that have been added to the already existing CERIF Entity Types, namely Base entities (Project, Person, Organisational Unit), Result entities (ResultPublication, ResultPatent, ResultProduct), Second Level entities and Link entities.

Furthermore, the JISC RIM2 MICE Project outcomes (Measuring Impact Under CERIF) have also been brought into the CECRIF 1.3 release under the Measurement & Indicator section. MICE was one of the RIM2 projects –together with CERIFy, BRUCE and IRIOS- presented last September at the JISC programme workshop in Manchester. MICE finished on July 2011 and aimed to “examine the potential for encoding systematic and structured information on research impact in the context of the CERIF schema. MICE aims to build on previous work on impact by producing a comprehensive set of indicators which will then be mapped both to the CERIF standard and the CERIF4REF schema created by the previous Readiness for REF (R4R) Project”. MICE-inspired CERIF 1.3 updates include creation of a new CERIF table, namely the impact measure table, as well as a set of impact indicators: categories that include such concepts as improving performance of existing businesses, improved health outcomes and cultural enrichment. euroCRIS was also involved in the RIM2 UKOLN-led CERIFy Project, dealing with measures of esteem, whose results were as well inspiring for CERIF new Measurement & Indicator definition.

Another new feature for this CERIF release is the Geographic bounding boxes, which will allow displayed information to be restricted to a given geographic area. Geographic bounding boxes are presently defined as squares, thus leaving room for geolocation improvement in future CERIF versions. Finally, a new Linked Open Data (LOD) CERIF Task Group is being planned by euroCRIS.

As a result from this new features, changes in CERIF 1.3 release include a whole set of new entities (such as cfMedium as a new Document Type) and new attributes, as well as removal of some other outdated attributes. The new CERIF version described at the tutorial was a preview, with features such as XML Data Exchange Format Specification and CERIF Formal Semantics still being worked upon until 1.3 version gets finally released next December.

An euroCRIS Overview Session followed the CERIF Tutorial, along which different members of euroCRIS Board reported recent activity. Keith Jeffery highlighted the euroCRIS Rome Declaration on CRIS/IR integration issued earlier this year and mentioned that while CERIF can generate multiple metadata standards such as DC, MODS, etc, OAR usual qDC-based metadata model was insufficiently accurate, so some integration should be seeked along the model CRIS-Publications OAR-Data/Software OAR.

Other euroCRIS-related activity includes EU FP7 OpenAIRE Project moving from qDC to some semi-CERIF standard, as well as the fact that OpenAIRE+ Project will use CERIF. By definition, CERIF serves a multiple-institution scheme (thus allowing for wider context-related information sharing for purposes such as the Research Excellence Framework assessment in the UK), so there’s also a clear need to operate internationally as to demonstrate CERIF interoperability capabilities.

Harry Lalieu, euroCRIS Secretary, announced CRIS2012 Conference to be held in Prague next June, and 2012 euroCRIS membership meetings, which will tale place in Prague just before the CRIS2012 event and possibly in Spain later next year.

Anne Asserson, Universitetet i Bergen and responsable for euroCRIS strategy, announced dataset management as the next environment CERIF will be next moving into (with projects such as University of Sunderland-led CERIF for Datasets paving the way for such move).

Speaking on behalf of Ed Simons, Universiteit Nijmegen and euroCRIS website manager, Keith Jeffery informed the audience a test CRIS is being planned for inclusion at the euroCRIS site, thus allowing for future live-demoing and functionality analysis.

Within the euroCRIS Task Group reports, Brigitte Joerg mentioned the euroCRIS Board-authored paper “Towards a Sharable Research Vocabulary (SRV) - A Model-driven Approach” having been presented at the Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR 2011) held last October in Izmir, Turkey. A preliminary meeting with Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository (VOA3R) Project was also recently held in Madrid in order to plan the future euroCRIS Linked Open Data (LOD) Task Group.

Nikos Houssos, NDC Athens and Task Group Projects leader mentioned running EC FP7 Projects euroCRIS is involved into, such as ENGAGE, dealing with Open Access to Public Sector Information, EuroRIs-Net, one of whose outputs is providing an online CERIF database of RI stakeholders, and OpenAIRE+. UK/JISC Projects such as CERIFy, CRISPool, BRUCE, IRIOS, MICE or RMAS were also cited as a proof of CERIF gradually becoming a common standard for RIM Programme Projects. Many of those projects are having an active euroCRIS involvement.

Danica Zendulková, CVTISR and CRIS-IR Interoperability Task Group leader, announced upcoming TG work along lines such as defining usecases for CRIS/IR interoperability, defining a model of integration interface (including XML data exchanges and web services), implementng an authority file model with attached persistent ID and promoting cooperation between CRIS/OAR communities.

Finally, David Baker, CASRAI and euroCRIS Architecture Task Group manager explained the way towards the Reference CRIS implementation. According to implementation plans, a test CRIS should be available at the euroCRIS site on June 2012.

Several sessions –see euroCRIS meeting presentations- followed the euroCRIS Overview, summarizing recent and forthcoming developments in CRIS and CERIF implementation. An interesting discussion was also held, led by Joachim Schöpfel, on teaching CRIS Systems to his Information Science students at Université de Lille and on potential CERIF application to the teaching environment and scholarly activities beyond research.

A particularly relevant presentation –as it described CERIF-based CRIS implementation in the UK, where CERIF standard adoption has been most successful so far– was UKOLN Rosemary Russell’s “CERIF UK landscape” (final report to be formally published later this year by UKOLN-University of Bath). Some figures were mentioned at the presentation: 17 PURE/Atira CERIF-based CRIS were implemented in the UK along last year, plus 5 Converis/Avedas CRISes and a large number of Symplectic Elements.

The CERIF UK Landscape Project carried out a set of seven interviews among ‘CRIS Project managers’ from different institutions - based at the institutional Research Office (2), Library/Info Services (4) or IT Department (1)- in order to gather their views on the implementation process, CRIS reception by end-users (researchers) and staff, plus experience on CERIF and integration with Institutional Repositories. A summary of the –often not so encouraging– answers is available at the presentation, CERIF being perceived by many as a far too complicated standard whose management would rather be handed over to the CRIS commercial provider. It is a fact however that institutions running a CERIF-based CRIS are in a much better position to deal with the REF requirements.

MaDAM: A JISC MRD Project for Research Data Management in the Biosciences... on the move

2011-10-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

Being in Manchester for the JISC Research Information management (RIM2) event, Sonex didn’t miss the opportunity it provided for paying a visit to the University of Manchester John Rylands University Library and meeting the JISC MRD MaDAM Project team. The 'MaDAM Pilot data management infrastructure for biomedical researchers at University of Manchester' has been funded by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme from Oct 2009 to Jun 2011 and has provided an inspiring example on how to start building an institutional research data management infrastructure almost from scratch.

In order to start developing this RDM infrastructure (see the Project Final Report for details), MaDAM focused on a set of research groups from the biomedical sciences strand aiming to learn about the ways they dealt with data management and to provide them -with their own close involvement- with tools to improve and standardise such practices. Selected research groups -Electron and Standard Microscopy group and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Neuropsychiatry Unit- were chosen due to their common need to deal with large images as their main source of research data.

Project focus on a rather narrow research scope was one of the keys to its success - due to its resulting ability to define common ways for dealing with the information, eg at metadata level. The MaDAM planning included further RDM strategy extension to other research groups within the UoM based on the lessons learnt from its application to the few initially selected groups. The MiSS Project (MaDAM into Sustainable Service), funded by the JISC MRD Programme 2011-2013, will be dealing with the RDM strategy extension and widening into the whole of the UoM research works along next years.

An Oracle APEX-based research data management application was developed by MaDAM for the concerned UoM research groups -later to be revamped in order to adapt it to the regular software standards applied at UoM. Frequent meetings were held with researchers along the aplication development so their feedback could be collected to ensure it would meet their needs. Storage needs per researcher per year were estimated (at around 500 GB), a metadata standard for specific data description was devised and stored in the RDM application, and work was carried out with interoperability isses in mind, both with the University CRIS in order to automatically populate Grant and Project information attached to datasets, and with the UoM Fedora-based eScholar IR, where final-version datasets would be transferred via Sword for dissemination, sharing and re-use.

Along the MaDAM Project several conceptual needs regarding the implementation of a solid RDM infrastructure across the UoM (and beyond) were identified -which were later included in the Project Final Report- the main two of which are the following:

- Some means of academic recognition of data-related work by researchers should be put in place in order to promote their involvement in RDM schemas and the adoption of common practices,

- A research data management policy should be adopted by the University of Manchester similar to the one issued at U Edinburgh so that some guidelines are established for providing support to researcher RDM tasks.

MaDAM gradual roll-out to other UoM research groups will face a set of challenges, research data being so discipline-specific. However, plans for such an extension and for ensuring the required institutional support for such a move were designed along MaDAM development -which saw the interest in taking part in the pilot project by a number of additional UoM research groups- and extension work will start soon.

CERIFying Research Information Systems... and Research Data

2011-10-14T00:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago Sonex was attending the JISC Research Information management (RIM2) event at MCC Manchester. It was a very good opportunity to review the four JISC-funded projects (BRUCE at Brunel, IRIOS at Sunderland, CERIFy at UKOLN and MICE at KCL) dealing with CERIF implementation for research information management purposes. A report for the event should be shortly available, along with the slides presented at the event.

Along this one-day meeting the CERIF for Datasets (C4D) Project was mentioned as an IRIOS Project extension to dataset management at the University of Sunderland. As stated in the project presentation, C4D aims to 'CERIFy' existing research dataset metadata conventions, and hence provide access to research data in an environment which also holds information on research projects and research outputs. C4D will also explore the commonality of research dataset metadata, and how much can be represented in CERIF.

Progress on Researcher ID initiatives: IRISC 2011 Helsinki

2011-09-17T04:34:00.000-07:00

The problem with names...

Prof. Carlos Martínez-Alonso is a renowned Spanish senior biochemist. He was actually President of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) when the Berlin Declaration was signed by the institution in January 2006. Prof. Martínez-Alonso has published hundreds of papers in high impact factor journals. However, when retrieving a complete list of his publications from PubMed database, you find out it is not possible unless several parallel author queries are carried out: there is a Martinez-A C entry under which most of his publications get listed [222]. But then there's also Martinez-Alonso C [21] and even Alonso CM [1].

It might be argued it's all about funny Spanish names with two surnames in them. That's a problem alright. Not just for Spanish names though: it's quite the same for Portuguese/Brazilian authors as well. Not to mention transliteration of Asian author names (see "Which Wei Wang?" Phys Rev 2007 editorial). PubMed is presently running its Author ID project in order to tackle this problem, which is by no means exclusive of theirs: around 2/3 of the over 6 million authors in MEDLINE share a last name and first initial with at least one other author, and an ambiguous name refers to 8 persons on average (Torvik and Smalheiser, "Author name disambiguation in MEDLINE").

Name disambiguation and proper attribution is a well-known problem in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. There have been and there are lots of initiatives trying to tackle this complex issue at subject, institutional or even national level - with remarkable success in the case of the Dutch Digital Author Identifier (DAI).

However, this is not an issue to be tackled at national nor subject level, but globally. Commercial stakeholders such as ThomsonReuters or Elsevier-Scopus are then in a privileged position to implement some international author unique identification schema. From a knowledge discovery viewpoint there are however some problems in this commercial-stakeholder approach: the ResearcherID, ThomsonReuter's author identifier, will provide seamless integration with ISI Web of Knowledge and show all author publications registered in that database, but will otherwise leave out most of the research output.

Some joint effort between public institutions and private stakeholders (remarkably publishers) must therefore be attempted to unify the multiple author identification standards and devise a single, comprehensive one at a global level. And that's where ORCID comes in.

... and strategies to tackle it: IRISC 2011 workshop

The Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative started in Dec 2009 as a non-profit organisation. Currently over 240 participants have joined the project for developing the one research identifier which is not limited to discipline, institution or geographical area. Many other projects are working in this issue at the same time (such as abovementioned discipline-based PubMed Author ID and Cornell University initially institutional then grown to national VIVO initiative).

ORCID and VIVO were two of the main topics of the IRISC 2011 Workshop on Identity in Research Infrastructure and Scientific Communication held this week (Sep 12-13) in Helsinki - see the event programme with attached presentations. Gudmundur "Mummi" Thorisson, Research Associate at University of Leicester and member of ORCID Technical Working Group, was IRISC 2011 main organizer.

There were two major IRISC 2011 strands: identity regarding knowledge discovery and identity for security & access control (focusing mainly on identity federation). A third big cross-issue along the Helsinki event was research data management, from three different perspectives:

i) dealing with a rapidly increasing amount of biomedical research data (Andrew Lyall, EMBL, ELIXIR Project)

ii) dealing with clinical research sensitive data (see Tony Brookes GEN2PHEN Project presentation)

iii) benefits the ORCID implementation might bring to research data attribution and management (mentioned in most ORCID-related presentations and discussions along the workshop)

There were several presentations dealing both with ORCID and closely resembling VIVO initiatives. Martin Fenner, Hannover Medical School and member of ORCID Board of Directors announced the ORCID registration service will start operating in spring 2012. ORCID will be open: researchers will be able to manage & maintain their profiles, filed data will be openly available, ORCID-related software will be released as open source, and researchers will control their privacy settings (with a chance too to share with particular members). Finally, for ORCID identity definition purposes, self-claim as well as external claiming sources will be used.

Brian Lowe, University of Cornell, presented the already running NIH-funded, institutionally-managed VIVO initiative. VIVO is aiming for an extensible semantic model-based more comprehensive approach than ORCID. However, links have already been established between both initiatives and ORCID is hoping to build upon VIVO success in the US.

Breakout sessions were held on IRISC Day 2 on the workshop's two main strands: "Unique identifiers and the Digital Scholar" (lead by Cameron Neylon and Jason Priem) and "What do researchers need from the authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI)?" (chaired by Michael Linden, CSC). Breakout session #1 was devoted to discussing potential tools and services to researchers ORCID could provide in the short term (6 months from adoption). Several groups were set up for the purpose and proposed ideas were later voted and discussed for selecting three main future worklines for ORCID to deal with. The proposed and selected use cases were the following:

-> data submission to repositories (multiple task attribution)

service to enable attribution or comment

pre-populate ORCID data

-> manuscript/grant tracking system

ORCID app gallery

-> automatic CV maintenance (potentially including data citations in CVs)

connecting different author research & social network profiles

Selected ORCID use cases were later introduced by Cameron Naylon along his talk 'ORCID and researchers' at the second annual ORCID Outreach Meeting held at CERN on Sep 16th, 2011.

Research data management in crystallography at the XXII IUCr Congress

2011-08-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

On Aug 29th a session on research data management will be held at the XXII Congress of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr2011). The session will feature talks by Brian McMahon (IuCr), Brian Matthews (I2S2 Project), Peter Murray-Rust (CrystalEye), John Westbrook (wwPDB) and Nick Spadaccini (DDLm). Peter Murray-Rust will deliver a talk along the session on Open Crystallography.

STM research data management and the Quixote Project

2011-08-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

A one-day seminar was held yesterday Thu Aug 25th at the Zaragoza Scientific Center for Advanced Modeling (ZCAM) on research data management and the Quixote Project for data management in Computational Chemistry. The session, entitled “Research data management: The experience of the Quixote project for Quantum Chemistry data. Can it be extended into a collection of research data management repositories?”, was attended by a rather diverse group of researchers (both computational chemists and from other disciplines) and repository managers, aiming to learn about research data management initiatives and specifically about the progress of the Quixote Project, in which two researchers from the University of Zaragoza and the CSIC Institute of Physical Chemistry "Rocasolano" are involved.

The Quixote Project (see paper "The Quixote project: Collaborative and Open Quantum Chemistry data management in the Internet age", in press with the J Chem Inf) is developing the infrastructure required to convert output from a number of different molecular quantum chemistry (QC) packages -such as NWChem or Gaussian- to a common semantically rich, machine-readable format and to build repositories of QC data results.

The session started with an introduction to "STM Research data management initiatives in Spain and abroad" delivered by SONEX member Pablo de Castro, in which different national approaches to RDM were presented based mainly on the information collected at the JISC MRD Programme International Workshop held last March in Birmingham.

Different approaches to data management taken from the JISC and SURF Foundation were discussed at Q&A time: for the JISC, datasets are assets per se, regardless of where they are attached to a research paper as supplementary material, whereas the 'Enhanced publication' approach from the SURF Foundation in the Netherlands, regards datasets mainly as digital objects connected to research publications. Some emphasis was made on the fact that the upcoming OpenAIREPlus European project shares the SURF approach.

Two presentations on the Quixote Project followed, "From Databases in QC 2010, ZCAM, Sep 2010 onwards: a brief history of Quixote" by Jorge Estrada and "The Quixote Project: a pioneering work in managing Computational Chemistry research data" by Pablo Echenique. Both Quixote project members explained the results, the challenges and the cooperation opportunities of this non-specifically-funded RDM project, engaging in a fruitful dialogue with the attending researchers and repository managers on how the QC data assets could be best managed.

Finally Peter Murray-Rust closed the morning interventions with some reflections on the subject "Entering a new era in data management" - see his blogpost for a summary of his ideas.

In the afternoon there were joint debates on how to improve implementation of research data management initiatives. Researcher motivation for dataset sharing was extensively debated: this motivation should ideally not just arise from a given funding agency actually requiring those data to be made available, but from the sheer advantages (as summarized by Peter Murray-Rust) that doing so would bring to the research practice and communication ("improving methodology").

An independent debate session was held for discussing how to start developing some kind of research data management infrastructure in those countries where work in this area is presently beginning. These are some recommendations that were put together by the participants in the debate:

- Some workgroup of (not just library-based) IT professionals should be put together for analysing the current infrastructure and the opportunities for launching new initiatives upon potentially reusable pre-existing ones,

- It would be advisable to analyze the researcher behaviour and needs in terms of storing their datasets into international platforms for data sharing (in case they are available for their specific discipline),

- It would be interesting to examine the motivation for data sharing from research groups in different research areas, so that initial efforts to develop data management infrastructures can start working with those areas more willing to share their data (Earth Sciences recurrently showing up when analysing the international perspective),

- Pioneering initiatives for providing services to STM researchers regarding data handling and storing from given Institutional Repositories (such as eSpacio UNED and Digital.CSIC) should be highlighted as a role model to be spread,

- The OpenAIREPlus/SURF Enhanced papers approach could be a good starting point for Institutional Repositories to work at, by finding out which of their presently filed papers have supplementary data attached at the journal site and trying to independently manage those ones,

- A need was detected along the session talks with researchers for a dataset management system at research centres for basic internal organisation purposes. Datasets filed in this internal storage system may or may not be aimed for publication,

- Production and publication of potentially citable datasets should be acknowledged as a relevant scientific contribution for research assessment purposes,

- There are big differences in needs, procedures and required infrastructure regarding data management between Big Science and long-tail science (the greater part actually being groups of three researchers in a lab with specific needs of their own),

- The Library is a potential supplier of know-how on data processing and storing for researchers, and that role should be promoted within the institutions,

- The Spanish e-Research National Network, mostly dealing with Grid and supercomputing initiatives, might be a good workgroup infrastructure for pioneering data management initiatives in Spain,

- There are real collaboration opportunities between the Quixote Project and the research information management infrastruture at the University of Zaragoza (two IRs being currently available, Zaguan at the University and Digital.CSIC at the Spanish Nacional Research Council, CSIC),

- Research staff (mainly PhD students) getting involved in the management and operation of the dataset information management systems (such as Chempound data repository at the University of Cambridge) seems a prerequisite for the success of the data management initiatives

- Due to the specific data features for various research areas, the incipient data management infrastructure available is more developed for the Social Sciences and Humanities than for STM research areas.

Repositories and CRIS: Working Smartly Together

2011-08-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Due to recent involvement in other OA repository-related activities at the University of Khartoum, reports at this blog on recent events such as the 'Repositories and CRIS: Working Smartly Together' workshop organised by RSP last Jul 19th in Nottingham and the 4th edition of the Repository Fringe in Edinburgh were slightly delayed. Good news about it is that interesting reports on these events have been published in the meantime (see the RSP event review by Gareth J. Johnson at UKCoRR blog). This will allow Sonex to take a different approach to the reporting, making it more of a reflection than of a description, as well as covering the conference followup.

One of the subjects discussed along the Reposit project session within the Conference at EMCC was what mailing list or discussion group should replace the reposit@googlegroups.com forum for discussing IR and CRIS-related issues once the RePosit project comes to an end. Several options were considered, from using already existing lists such as UKCoRR's or ARMA's, to creating a new Super-CRIS list at JISC mail such as cris-super@jiscmail.ac.uk. Steps are being taken after the workshop to make this new list available.

The REF is working as a very strong driver towards CRIS implementation (with CERIF format being extensively considered in order to become a standard, see Marc Cox's presentation). A good number of HEIs do now operate a CRIS as a result (either commercial, in-house built or an extension of their EPrints repository). That is the good news. The not so good ones may be the fact that due to CRIS systems offering an enhanced collection of features, RIM infrastructure managers are starting to wonder whether an Open Access repository (usually managed by the Library) isn't becoming a somehow redundant piece of software, with most of its functionalities being increasingly covered by the CRIS (managed at the Research Offices). Repository phase-out is thus beginning to be discussed at given institutions for integration and optimization purposes. However, as Janet Aucock (University of St. Andrews) writes in the reposit@googlegroups list, even if the degree of overlap between repositories and CRIS systems may be large and growing, there are still features a CRIS will not be able to deliver:

"(...) Another point is to do your homework really well and make absolutely sure that the CRIs can deliver everything that a repository can do. Can it provide established permanent identifiers for items? Can it handle embargoes effectively? What about stats? Does the discovery interface in the portal display all the metadata that you need with regard to open access full text eg rights statements etc. These are small details which we take for granted but are not always embedded into the CRIS. CRIS software is still evolving too, and perhaps not all the functionality necessary is there yet. Another aspect of this is the question of the interfaces for users and discovery. Is the CRIS successfully harvested or crawled by search engines. Is it ranked appropriately. Can it expose metadata appropriately to other services where required? Can it isolate metadata with full text attached/open access full text attached and allow that set to be harvested and reused? We know that our own CRIS supplier is still working on adding all the "repository" functionality that they think is needed for their product. But at the moment I don't know the fine detail of this".

Besides R4R/CERIF4REF Project at KCL mentioned by Marc Cox, other projects also dealing with CERIF implementation regarding CRISes were mentioned such as MICE for Measuring Impact under CERIF, or the BRUCE Project (Brunel Research Under a CERIF Environment) that was presented at the 2011 euroCRIS meeting in Bologna last May (see Sonex post on the two recent euroCRIS meetings in Italy).

Another interesting outcome of this RSP event was the opportunity to learn from local SHERPA RoMEO team about the RoMEO API new v2.8 version and the release of the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher's Policy Tool, that will allow publishers to directly define their RoMEO policies via an embedded portal in SHERPA (actually presented next day, Jul 20th, at the 'RoMEO for Publishers' event in London).

Finally, a poster was featured in the event poster section called “SICA: A CRIS with an embedded Repository working for the innovation in Andalusia Region (Spain)”. With this integrated system for recording scientific production of the researchers belonging to nine universities, research organizations, technology centres and other scientific institutions of the Andalusia region in Spain, the National & Regional CRIS/IR integration initiatives (as recorded by Sonex in its May'2010 post) keep growing. This particular CRIS initiative is being developed within the European SISOB Project on -yet again- how to measure the impact of science in society.

Besides this -not thorough nor systematically updated- Sonex list of National & Regional CRIS/IR integration initiatives, a comprehensive list of 'CRIS + Repositories in the UK' is being put together as a Conference followup. When complete (it's open for any missing one to be filled in) the list will join the RSP Wiki where Institutional Repositories in the UK are already listed as to provide a clear picture of existing infrastructure.

KULTURising research repositories

2011-07-17T03:39:00.000-07:00

"...I can only add that research for art, craft and design needs a great deal of further research. Once we get used to the idea that we don't need to be scared of 'research' - or in some way protected from it - the debate can really begin."
(Christopher Frayling, RCA Rector (1996-2010), from: "Research in Art and Design" (Royal College of Art Research Papers, Vol 1, No 1, 1993/4). Royal College of Art, London).

On the Jul 6th meeting at JISC Brettenham House some planning was done as well for Sonex extension besides Swordv2's. In the framework of this project extension, Sonex is expected inter alia to further support the JISC Deposit Projects and continue to gather international deposit use cases, as well as to provide some
recommendations on how to improve deposit.

As part of this further involvement with JISC Deposit Projects, Sonex was attending the Kultivate Project Conference on Jul 15th at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

Based at the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a research centre at the University for the Creative Arts, and funded by the JISC from late November 2010 to the end of July 2011 within the JISC Deposit strand, the Kultivate Project aims to "share and support the application of best practice in the development of institutional repositories that are appropriate to the specific needs and behaviours of creative and visual arts researchers". Kultivate builds upon the knowledge and experience of the Kultur II group, which grew out of the JISC funded Kultur project (2007-2009). The Group currently consists of over forty institutions and projects and is led by the VADS.

Specific goals of the Kultivate project are:

- to increase the rate of arts research deposit,
- to enhance the user experience for researchers, and
- to develop and sustain a sector-wide community of shared best practice in arts research repositories.

There are significant differences between Kultivate and the rest of the JISCdepo projects (RePosit, DURA and DepositMO) in the sense that while the three other ones deal specifically with semi-automation of widely-recognised content ingest into repositories (mainly by fostering platform interoperability), Kultivate seeks
to extend the coverage of institutional repositories to the creative arts environment, which is both rather different in nature to the mentioned well-accepted research and which hasn't been specifically addressed so far as scholarly output. In this regard, Kultivate can be both seen as sort of an outlier project and as the most challenging of them four.

After eight months of hard work, the Kultivate Project Conference put together a model set of talks and presentations (see programme and updated presentations) to introduce the project outcomes.

Several talks made introductory reflections on what creative arts research should be - with its specific peculiarities. The fact that the output from activities in the creative arts is or is not called research (artists themselves sound a bit surprised sometimes on being called researchers) doesn't seem that relevant anyway - main thing actually being it's scholarly output from many HEIs and Arts Schools, and as such it should be subject to standard deposit into institutional repositories.

However, it is often hard to persuade artists to have their work filed into repositories ("the repo doesn't fit the needs of creative artists" a frequent allegation for not taking part in the project). In this regard, advocacy is particularly critical for institutional projects being carried out in the area - they are breaking through in a discipline where no such thing could possibly exist (so far) as PubMed, Chemical Abstracts or arXiv.

See examples of effective advocacy under the Kultivate project umbrella at Goldsmiths Research Online and UAL Research Online, plus the own Kultivate Advocacy Toolkit, one of the project's main outputs.

Another relevant progress Kultivate is promoting is the setting of metadata standards for description of creative artworks (something that incidentally brings the project closer to the data management strand rather that to the deposit one, making it a quite heterodox one). See for instance 'The listening room' item at UAL Research Online with its four-tabbed description including metadata as well as images and videos (and thus effectively delivering an answer to frequent artists complain on work documentation: "I did a performance, not a video" or "Fine, but where am I?").

Performance Art Data Structure (PADS), for which the unit subject to description is the 'work' not the 'digital object', is yet another solution for complex description of creative arts output developed by the University of Bristol within the JISC-funded CAiRO Project for Complex Archive Ingest for Repository Objects (see example of PADS example record for 'Becoming snail' performance by Paul Hurley at JISC Digital Media).
PADS is also involved in the Europeana attempt to standardise perfomance metadata accross the EU.

Finally, a good (and growing) number of EPrints-based implementations of the Kultur enhancements for designing creative arts output-focussed institutional repositories were presented at the project conference (incidentally arising questions by DSpace-based IR managers on when something similar will be developed for DuraSpace). Kultivate has also provided (in cooperation with the University of Southampton team) a set of technical enhancements to the EPrints platform, among them on the MePrints application and the IRStats package.

Implementation of those enhancements by different institutions (either arts-focussed or general purposed ones with Arts Departments within them) is giving way to a wave of repository KULTURisation (ie being adapted to deal with creative arts output) across the UK that might well spread beyond that once working standards are consolidated. In the meantime the VADS-lead eNova project is already building upon the outputs of both Kultivate and Kultur projects.

Sword-Sonex project extension

2011-07-11T02:04:00.000-07:00

"Data deposit nowadays... is mainly based upon submission by email... and remains labour-intensive"
(Simon Hodson, JISCMRD Programme manager, on present data deposit workflows)

Representatives of the JISC-funded Sword and Sonex projects met Balviar Notay and Simon Hodson (JISC) on July 6th at Brettenham House, London for further dealing with Sword v2 extension to automated transfer of research data (see reference to last meeting on the issue on Nov 20th).

Once the first round of JISCMRD Phase I projects is over and final reports have been published, the Sword-Sonex workteam is already working to put together a data transfer use case document where different project solutions are listed, with their advantages and shortcomings, so that some analysis is carried out on how Sword might aid the automation of the dataset transfer into repositories (or similar target resources for research data). The team will liaise with several JISCMRD projects in order to find out their specific approach to the data transfer issue. Timeschedule for the extended Sword project (coordinated by Paul Walk, UKOLN) is as follows:

WP1: Identify key projects & individuals who have relevant information and skills regarding datasets [Jul 6-13]

WP2: Document the dataset use cases in collaboration with Sonex [Jul 18-end Aug]

WP3: Interpret the data set use cases as processes carried out with Sword [Sep 5-24]

WP4: Carry out gap analysis on dataset use cases on Sword and recommend future work, and produce a web resource for any new or existing JISC projects (such as those in JISCMRD2 Programme) to refer to, which will provide all the relevant information regarding dataset deposit [Sep 27-Oct 21]

WP5: Identify key Sword clients and potential client environments, accept and evaluate proposals, issue development contracts [Jul 6-Aug 15]

WP6: Development of 1, 2 or 3 client environments [Sep 5-end Oct]

WP7: Project management and administration [Jul 6-end Oct]

CRIS and OAR 2011: "Integrating research information"

2011-07-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

Two important euroCRIS events were held in Italy at the end of May: the 2nd workshop on CRIS and OAR (Rome, May 23-24) and the euroCRIS membership meeting 2011 (Bologna, May 26-27). Following last year's euroCRIS meetings in Aalborg for euroCRIS 2010 and Rome for the 1st workshop on CRIS and OAR (link to Sonx posts), these two 2011 workshops offered the international reseach information community the opportunity to debate current state of the development of CRIS systems and their integration with Open Access Repositories for best serving institutional needs in different countries.

Bernard Rentier was a keynote speaker at the meeting at CNR in Rome (presentations available here), where he presented the 'à la liégoise' mandate he has promoted at the Université of Liége for populating the ORBI institutional repository (currently holding near 65,000 items). The ORBI-generated report is actually the only official document for research evaluation at ULg.

Keith Jeffery (STFC) -the embedded milestones, roadmap and workshop purpose slides are taken from his presentation- introduced the 2011 Rome workshop by describing the progress made in the CERIF implementation since last euroCRIS meeting, the 2010 and 2011 milestones (CERIF spreading to several continents, adoption of Avedas Converis at ERC and the ENGAGE Project on Open Govenment Data and the JISC 'Measuring Impact under CERIF' (MICE) Project in the UK), the CERIF roadmap for 2011 and 2012-12 and the purpose of the CNR workshop.

After lots of interesting presentations on the workshop day 1 (with a special mention to CRIS/OAR integration examples in the UK by Simon Kerridge, U Sunderland and ARMA), day 2 was devoted to joint work by workshop attendees on updating the white paper on CRIS and OAR integration. This work resulted in the recently published (July 8th) Rome Declaration on CRIS and OAR, consensus on which was reached after extensive debate via mail.

A few days after the CNR workshop, the 2011 euroCRIS Spring Meeting was held at CINECA, Bologna (watch meeting presentation by Nicola Bertazzoni), with special emphasis on the topic 'CRIS in a University IT environment', for which Italian (Politecnico di Torino Research Information System) and British (BRUCE Project - Brunel Research Under a CERIF Environment) examples were presented.

Gettin' on...

2011-07-10T11:18:00.000-07:00

After quite a long, not totally intended silence - schedules get so hectic every now and then- it is the purpose of the Sonex workgroup to update the project blog by briefly reporting on recently held workshops we have attended since last post. These have been, inter alia, the 2nd euroCRIS/CNR-IRPPS workshop on CRIS and OAR (Rome, May 23-24), euroCRIS membership meeting 2011 (Bologna, May 26-27), CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI7, Geneva, June 22-24) and LIBER 40th Annual Conference 2011 (Barcelona, Jun 29-Jul 2).

A first analysis of data management

2011-05-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

As previously mentioned in this blog, the Sonex workgroup is now try to extend its use case scenario analysis on 'Deposit opportunities into repositories' to the realm of research data. A first meeting held at EDINA on Mar 30th served the purpose of drawing a general picture of the data management landscape.

Stress should be put on the fact that the way of handling SSH and STM data may substantially differ. Given the strong IASSIST-attachment of some Sonex members, the workgroup initial approach to data management may therefore be a bit biased towards procedures in the area of Social Science and Humanities. However, attention will be paid as well to specific ways of dealing with STM datasets as the analysis gets fine-tuned.

Moving along the same lines as we did for research articles, we first try to tackle the ACTIONS scope. Data deposit is certainly an issue, but there's more to data-related processes than just deposit. It's also about Access to data and also about Data Notification/Register.

Next we get on to the WHAT and the WHO. Answer to WHAT? is a data set. Previous analysis by Peter Burnhill shows -at least- three different types of research data (see image below).

Dealing mainly with the data file itself, this data type classification is somewhat narrow for the general picture of data management, so Sonex would rather set a new and more generic data classification for answering the question WHAT is there to deposit:

Metadata record

Codebook or user guide, where all necessary information is provided to allow for data re-use*

Raw data or dataset file(s)

* See a DCMI-based description at: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). (2009). Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving: Best Practice Throughout the Data Life Cycle (4th ed.). Ann Arbor, MI. Section 'Important documentation elements', p. 22

These three elements should ideally be supplied as a single package.

As to the question of WHO performs each data-related operation (Notification-Deposit-Grant access), a handful of running projects within the JISC MRD (phase I) programme should serve to test the different use cases resulting from a double-entry 'Action/What' table as featured below.

Next step as we proceed to further development of this preliminary analysis should be a survey for gathering information on procedures for data handling as carried out in specific JISC MRD projects.

National initiatives for promoting data management strategies: an overview

2011-04-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

- "Hello, I want to deposit my data"
- "Sir, this is a library!"
- "Sorry" -he whispers- "I want to deposit my data".
(as told by Brian Hole, British Library, along his presentation of the DRYAD UK initiative)

Main objective of the JISC MRD International Workshop held last month was to review progress achieved by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme and to discuss this in the context of broader international developments.

As stated in the workshop programme overview, "this dimension reflects key partnerships which JISC, the JISCMRD Programme and the DCC has been building through the IDCC Conference, the Knowledge Exchange and other initiatives. They include the Australian National Data Service, the NSF funded DataNet Projects, institutions in the US and Australia, the DFG, SURF, DANS etc".

Whithin the broader context, besides a couple of preliminary talks on the European Union approach to (and future funding of) data management initiatives -by John Wood, on the EU 'Riding the wave' report, and by Carlos Morais-Pires on the Digital Agenda for Europe- the workshop featured a specific session on "National and international infrastructure initiatives" whose first panel was called "Approaches and strategies in the UK, US, and Germany". Australian and Dutch national or specific approaches were also discussed, either at this session or later along the event.

Besides the national initiatives featured in this and further sessions along the meeting -it was reassuring to see such a broad scope of strategies or already running projects taking place at the same time in so many different countries- there are also additional, sometimes preliminary initiatives for promoting data management policies at national or institutional level in other countries such as Finland, Portugal, France, Poland or South Africa.

As new initiatives for research data management keep steadily coming up, this session was an opportunity to get an informal update on DCC's report 'Comparative Study of International Approaches to Enabling the Sharing of Research Data' - see its summary and main findings here as of Nov 2008.

Digital Curation Centre - UK
Kevin Ashley, Digital Curation Centre (DCC), described the present picture of data management in the UK as "a new context", where Universities are increasingly willing to take responsibility for data management (specially in areas not covered by Data Centres).
Once UK funder and NSF rules for Data Management Planning are being implemented, this in-advance planning is becoming very important for funders, researchers, institutions, collaborators and reusers. DCC current tasks include integrating different Data Discovery Services plus building institutional capacities: skills, policies, etc. Besides that, DCC is providing the new DMP Online service aimed to produce and maintain Data Management Plans.
Good news is that, despite varying degrees of involvement, institutions in the UK have accepted their role in RDM.

NSF-funded DataNet Projects - US
A summary of present state of research data management in the US was provided by presentations of the DataONE and DataConservancy initiatives, resp. delivered by William Michener (University Libraries at U New Mexico) and Sayeed Choudhury (Johns Hopkins University).

After stating that "researchers are presently using 90% of their time managing data instead of interpreting them", W. Michener presented the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) initiative (a live DataONE presentation at U of Tennessee is available). This NSF-supported initiative aims to ensure preservation and access to multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national science data. DataONE Coordinating Nodes around the world will help achieving needed international collaboration for solving the grand science and data challenges, particularly with regard to education.

The DataConservancy initiative aims to research, design, implement, deploy, and sustain data curation infrastructure for cross-disciplinary discovery with an emphasis on observational data. S. Choudhury's presentation stressed the need for data preservation as a necessary condition for data reuse and introduced the recent connection of data and publications through arXiv.org as one of the pilot projects that build upon the Project APIs.

DFG - Germany
New DFG information infrastructure projects in Germany were presented by Dr Stefan Winkler-Nees, who mentioned both Jan 2009 DFG Recommendations for Secure Storage and Availability of Digital Primary Research Data, as a base report for promoting standardized work in the data management area, and DFG running call for proposals "Information infrastructures for research data". Selected projects at this call are due to be shortly announced and will start on May/Jun'2011. Finally, in a a common line of thought with other initiatives, Dr. Winkler-Nees mentioned DFG is aiming for teaching and qualification of both researchers and data curators.

SURF Foundation & DANS - The Netherlands
Later on along the workshop, John Doove presented the SURF Enhanced Publications initiative within the SURFshare programme 2007-2011. Six new projects funded along 2011 by the SURF Foundation will allow researchers from a variety of disciplines to share datasets, illustrations, audio files, and musical scores with fellow researchers in the context of Enhanced Publications (programme video available on YouTube). There were already two previous grants rounds for Enhanced Publications. The six running projects, whose results are due in May 2011, take place within five disciplines: Economics (Open Data and Publications, Tilburg University), Linguistics (Lenguas de Bolivia, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Enhanced NIAS Publications, KNAW-Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts ans Sciences), Musicology (The Other Josquin, University Utrecht), Communication sciences (Enhancing Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, KNAW) and Geosciences (VPcross, KNAW).

The Dutch strategy for increasing research data available online was completed with the presentation "Sustainable and Trusted Data Management" delivered by Laurent Sesink (DANS-Data Archiving and Networked Services). DANS, est. 2005, deals with storage and continuous accessibility of research data in
the social sciences and humanities and promotes the 'Data Seal of Approval' for certification of data repositories, guaranteeing via a series of required criteria a qualitatively high and reliable way of managing research data.

Australian National Data Service (ANDS) - Australia
Finally, Andrew Treloar, Director of Technology, Australian National Data Service (ANDS), supplied a comprehensive perspective from a national infrastructure provider and in a way summarized previous talks by saying that, despite differences, there are common themes emerging in national approaches to data management, as there are things only they can do. Along his plenary presentation "Data: Its origins in the past, what the problems are in the present, and how national responses can help fix the future" he mentioned for instance that Hubble Space Telescope-related publication statistics show double research is being done thanks to data reuse. Efficiency, validation, integrity of scholarly records, value for money and self-interest were listed as (non-altruistic) arguments for data reuse.

Having the chance to attend this series of brilliant presentations and checking out how policies for opening access to research data keep spreading over institutions and countries were undoubtedly part of the Birmingham workshop highlights. Next opportunity for keeping up with it all will be next November at the Knowledge Exchange Workshop on Research Data Management in Bonn, Germany.

Could external cooperation improve collection of specific JISC MRD project-related information?

2011-04-25T05:34:00.001-07:00

In forthcoming days SONEX will be publishing some posts on the JISC MRD Programme International Workshop held last March 28-29th at Aston Business School Conference Centre, Birmingham. Certain aspects debated at this comprehensive meeting were very useful for establishing an approach for dealing with research data management from a SONEX viewpoint, as debated in a SONEX meeting at EDINA on Mar 30th whose outcome will also be shortly blogged.

See IUCr Brian McMahon's report for a general review on the JISC MRD workshop.

One of the most visible disciplinary approaches to data management presented at the JISC MRD event -which featured all kinds of institutional and subject-based initiatives in the area- was the one coming from meteorology, palaeoclimatology and climate-related sciences: there was a presentation of the PEG-BOARD Project (U of Bristol) at the Subject-Oriented Approaches session on Monday, followed by ACRID (U of East Anglia & STFC) and Metafor (BADC & STFC) Project presentations on Tuesday afternoon.

One of the most relevant features of these climate-related projects is interdisciplinarity. PEG-BOARD Project in particular aims to serve the archaeology research community by supplying them their paleoclimate data.

A few specific aspects about PEG-BOARD were discussed after the project presentation. Interesting thing about them is they were not mentioned along the talk, nor are they reported at the project site:

- Due to the project interdisciplinarity, there are two clearly different user groups for palaeoclimatology data produced: climatologists, who will understand the nature of involved datasets, as they're central to their discipline, and archaeologists, who don't and need not know much about the data format but need the information contained in it for their own purposes - thus functioning as regular non-technical users to the project instead of researchers. However, as they are indeed researchers, the feedback they may provide on the project outcome could be so much more valuable.

- What archaeologists care about in the end is the data plottings, and Data Centres will not provide such processing. So what PEG did was implement specific software capabilities that will address the needs of non-technical data users (i.e. archaeologists), as to allow them to search for the plots or false-colour graphics they need. This piece of middleware is a conceptual key feature of the project in terms of deliverables.

- Climate data is usually archived in binary format, so it's often not easy to process. UK Met Office provided lots of info, often incomplete or in old formats. The adaption process of raw data to the project needs was very interesting and worth disseminating.

- Climate models were written in FORTRAN. When re-written or translated into C++, the results would vary for the same data arrays due to specific treatment by the code. That poses a quite amazing challenge in terms of model interpretation.

- When asked on whether researchers provided enriched metadata for their data, the answer was there's usually an input in terms of past experiments, i.e. "this is the data outcome of such and such experiment when changing initial conditions in such a way". Such-and-such experiment would be described the same way until one was reached that wasn't described at all.

The fact that none of these project aspects is recorded or discussed at the project blog poses a question on whether an external approach to data management projects might collect and disseminate very interesting information that researchers may not consider relevant enough to discuss from project blogs. Such an external approach to running projects might be carried out by data librarians in order to
share these specific project details with the data management community.

For whatever it may be worth, Sonex would be keen to do this kind of job for the MRD community.

I2S2 Project workshop at RAL-STFC

2011-04-05T02:48:00.000-07:00

Along a busy week in terms of research data management events (due to be shortly reported from this blog), last Friday Apr 1st Sonex had the opportunity -thanks to Simon Hodson, JISC MRD programme manager- to attend the I2S2 Project workshop at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory (RAL) at STFC in Didcot. I2S2 -standing for 'Infrastructure for Integration in Structural Sciences' is a JISC MRD project ending in Mar 2011 aiming to "identify requirements for a data-driven research infrastructure in "Structural Science", focusing on the domain of Chemistry, but with a view towards inter-disciplinary application".

Several presentations were delivered along the meeting: Brian Matthews on the I2S2 project achievements, ICAT architecture and CSMD metadata standard, Brian McMahon, International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) on 'Information Management and Publication in Crystallography', Tom Griffin on TopCAT GUI for management of data coming out of STFC ISIS and DIAMOND facilities, Steve Androulakis on the TARDIS ANDS-supported project at Monash University, Mark Borkum on OreCHEM files, Chris Morris on on PiMS (Protein Information Management System) and Juan Bicarregui on the EU PANData project.

Along the IUCr presentation the need was identified for filing & preserving different data categories such as raw measurements, processed numerical data, derived info and the paremeters. The convenience of providing access to raw diffraction images was also stressed along the talk, these files being a few GB in size, and thus not large enough for Data Centres but too big for sites such as CCDC. A review on Crystallographic Information Framework (CIF) file formats was provided, with imgCIF being used for raw data storing out of the experiment, .fcf for including structure factors after data reduction and a final stage of structure solution and refinement being performed in the lab before the author starts formatting those into a IUCr paper, which would translate CIF into SGML for producing final fcf, cif, pdf and html versions.

Raw data was mentioned to be kept for 183 days at SFTC and 3 months at Australian Synchrotron (in which TARDIS is involved), and a discussion followed on the fact that some agreement shoud be reached on the kind of data that ought to be stored and preserved. The process of attachment of DOIs to datasets was also discussed, IUCr being presently involved in projects such as XYZ or Open Bibliography in order to promote this objective.

A TopCAT demo was provided by Tom Griffin. This open source GUI (see image above) is being used for storing raw data from STFC facilities such as ISIS and DIAMOND. TopCAT provides access to its contents through an open registration system, thus operating as a sort of STFC institutional data repository, and would be potentially applicable to other institutions, facilities and disciplines.

TARDIS presentation by Steve Androulakis, Monash Univ, Australia, mentioned their using of XML/METS metadata standards for research data description at the federated institutional repository-platform initially meant to store X-ray diffraction images, later evolving into a much larger initiative with application into microscopy (MicroTARDIS), particle physics and gene processing through the Squirrel software.

Finally, extra presentations were delivered on PiMS (Protein Information Management System) by Chris Morris, STFC and on the European PANData project by Juan Bicarregui, STFC e-Science. PANData aims to build Photon and Neutron Data Infrastructure through a consortium of European synchrotron facilities and neutron sources.

A final summary was made on the whole set of presented I2S2-related features (imgCIF, CIF, IuCr/XML/RDF BIBLIO, PDBML, CML, ICAT, TopCAT, ICAT Lite/CSMD, TARDIS, PiMS, PANData, NeXuS) by mapping them on the I2S2 Idealized Scientific Research Activity Lifecycle Model (see image above - may click on it for an updated version). References were also made to other initiatives not represented at the meeting such as Quixote Project for Computational Chemistry CML data management or Protein Production and Crystallization.

Strategies for research data deposit in ongoing data management projects

2011-03-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

Prior to start performing pattern analysis for research data deposit into (institutional or subject-based) data repositories –whether or not open access– first step by Sonex is to scope ongoing projects dealing with that kind of deposit, as well as already closed projects which supplied relevant guidelines on the subject. A list of projects working on data management follows, with their specific approach on how to deal with actual data deposit as taken from project blogs:

TARDIS (Monash University–Australian National Data Service).
“There is a pressing need for the archival and curation of raw X-ray diffraction data. However, the relatively large size of these datasets has presented challenges for storage in a single worldwide repository. This problem can be avoided by using a federated approach, where each institution or university utilizes its institutional repository”.

ADMIRAL: A JISC-funded data management infrastructure for research across the life sciences.
"The purpose of the ADMIRAL Project is to create a two-tier federated data management infrastructure for use by life science researchers, that will provide services (a) to meet their local data management needs for the collection, digital organization, metadata annotation and controlled sharing of biological datasets; and (b) to provide an easy and secure route for archiving annotated datasets to an institutional repository, The Oxford University Data Store, for long-term preservation and access, complete with assigned Digital Object Identifiers and Creative Commons open access licences".
(See Oxford University Library Services' Databank)

XYZ Project. “The XYZ Project will create a demonstrator of a new workflow for publishing data in support of full-text. The author prepares data for publication (if possible with validation) in a third-party trusted repository before the paper is submitted to a publisher. Our software will manage the deposition, release to reviewers, dis-embargo and for conventional publication or as a data journal. Two Open Access publishers (International Union of Crystallography and BioMed Central) are engaged with the project and will test the new workflow”.
Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes: A demonstrator repository hosted by the IUCr.

FISHnet: Freshwater information sharing network. “This project will allow researchers in multiple academic, governmental and voluntary-sector institutions to share their data. Data will be held securely in a sustainable subject repository which preserves and disseminates multiple datasets as part of the FreshwaterLife.org information portal. Data creators will be able to manage access rights to their content, from Open Access to sharing with trusted colleagues”.

DMBI: Data Management in Bio-Imaging. “The quantity of data generated by modern high-throughput bio-imaging systems presents a significant challenge in both data management and processing. Furthermore, there is no explicit system/way to record the processing algorithms and parameters that are used to produce results. Thus there is no strong link between images, software and results. This projects aims to address these issues”.
Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes: Build a prototype DMBI system around OMERO.

CaiRO: Curating Artistic Research Output. “No prominent subject-based repository exists to act as the custodians of arts practice-as-research data. Where institution provision for data management is in place (for instance, an institutional repository service) the arts researcher-practitioner cannot always rely on an understanding of the special nature of arts research data. More commonly, data is retained in departmental collections, built and maintained by small teams which often include researchers themselves”.

BRIL: Biophysical Repositories in the Lab. “The BRIL project aims to enhance the repository facilities at the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics at King’s College London. This will involve:
» Embedding the repository within the researchers’ day-to-day research and experimental practices;
» Integrating the repository into the wider King’s infrastructure”.
Example of KCL “internal” repository: Mutation Testing Repository.

ADS+: Enhancing and Sustaining the Archaeology Data Service digital repository. The project aims to “Increase the sustainability of the ADS, by implementing Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). This is a world-leading open source digital repository application which will allow the automation of many ADS curatorial functions, according to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model (ISO 14721:2003). This will help ensure the long term preservation of all ADS digital archives, as well as making the ADS archival procedures more cost-effective”.

IDMB (Institutional Data Management Blueprint) Project, U. Southampton.
The project’s aims are to provide the University of Southampton with a ten-year roadmap for delivery of a comprehensive data management infrastructure.

[IDMB Recommendations] The data management audit and gap analysis indicates where improvements can be made in the short, medium and long-term to improve data management practices and capabilities at the University. The following preliminary recommendations are put forward for short (one year), medium (one to three years), long (more than three years) term action.
[Short Term (1 year)] Crucial to supporting researchers is the consolidation of data management into a coherent framework that is easy to understand, use, and has a sustainable business model behind it. A number of major recommendations are put forward here for the short-term:
• Create an institutional data repository
• Develop a scalable business model
• One-stop shop for data management advice and guidance

MaDAM: Pilot data management infrastructure for biomedical researchers at University of Manchester.
A pilot infrastructure for Biomedical Researchers at the University of Manchester, which covers data capture, data storage and data curation. This infrastructure comprises procedural support, hardware and software.
[18/03/2010] The development team have built a prototype data management front end which fits a generic set of needs amongst our Life Sciences researchers. It is aimed at being flexible enough to allow researchers themselves to assign attributes (i.e. metadata) to their experiments and datasets for them to be usefully categorised and tagged. The prototype is also entirely dispensable and intended as a catalyst for feedback from our use cases on their specific functionality requirements.

DISC-UK DataShare Project. The DISC-UK DataShare project, led by EDINA National Data Centre and the Edinburgh University Data Library, with partners at the Universities of Southampton and Oxford, has advanced the current provision of repository services for accommodating datasets in the UK.
Key conclusions: 1) Data management motivation is a better bottom-up driver for researchers than data sharing but is not sufficient to create culture change, 2) Data librarians, data managers and data scientists can help bridge communication between repository managers & researchers, 3) Institutional repositories can improve impact of sharing data over the internet.

Repository take-up and embedding: the future of repositories

2011-03-03T12:52:00.001-08:00

Being already in Birmingham for the JISC Deposit Project Meeting on Mar 1st, Sonex stayed in town for attending the JISC Repositories Take-Up and Embedding Meeting as well. Start up meeting for this new JISC programme aimed to outline the future of repositories, dealing with specific issues such as (automated) deposit, shared services like RoMEO or OpenDOAR, repository integration into general software infrastructures for research information managament and promoting national (via RSP) and international (via KE, COAR and OpenAIRE) collaboration.

Six projects were presented along this programme start up meeting:

- Bringing a Buzz to NECTAR (Miggie Pickton, University of Northampton)
- Hydrangea: letting the repository flower (Richard Green, University of Hull)
- MIRAGE 2011: Repository Enrichment from Archiving to Creation (Xiaohong Gao, Middlesex University)
- Enhanced interface design for supporting take-up and embedding of the Glasgow School of Art research repository, including visual
engagement with practice led and applied outputs (Robin Burgess, Glasgow School of Art)
- eNova (Marie-Therese Gramstadt, VADS)
- EXPLORER: Embedding eXisting & Propriatary Learning in an Open-source Repository to Evolve new Resources (Alan Cope, De Montfort University)

An extra postprandial presentation on repository consolidation within a university research information management environment and the way it was done at University of Glasgow Enlighten IR was delivered by Willian Nixon. Statements like "Silos are the past, embedding repositories -through the use of tools like Sword or LDAP- is the future" made the point on how repositories should evolve in the future. According to William, repositories are to exploit new opportunities for data mining, business, intelligence, KPIs, analytics, 'stickiness' and visibility (some of these issues being thoroughly dealt with at Enlighten repository blog).

There was a remarkable presence of image-related projects among the presentations, Glasgow School of Arts, eNova and MIRAGE 2011 dealing with archiving of images into repositories one way or another. This is great news for momentum-gaining development of new information infrastructures in the area (also traceable at the JISC Deposit Programme meeting the day before), which will no doubt benefit from these projects outcomes.

After watching project presentations from a Sonex point of view, it seems they could particularly benefit from interacting with JISC Deposit projects in terms of implementing resulting strategies for automated content ingest into repositories. A handful of the take-up and embedding projects would thus be the soundest candidates for initial "customer implementation" of the various resulting methods for quick population of repositories with institutional research output (the take-up bit, prior to embedding) coming from the Deposit strand. As these projects will run
until the end of 2011 and the ones from Deposit strand should deliver around July, interaction among them could probably be easily achieved.

There was one particular project among those presented that captured Sonex's attention: MIRAGE 2011, Middlesex Medical Image Repository with a Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems Archiving Environment. MIRAGE is both an image-related repository project (as it deals with medical images) and a research data project, and it's this latter feature what gets it fully within scope of Sonex activity with regard to research data management. Ongoing data management projects (either JISC-funded or otherwise) usually deal with either numerical or textual data, but projects dealing with the deposit of graphical research data are rare (save for Data Management in Bio-Imaging - DMBI project run at The John Innes Centre, BBSRC, Norwich).

A couple of references were shared with MIRAGE project manager Dr. Xiaohong Gao, 'Feeding Neuroimaging Repositories' poster presented at OR2010 Madrid last July by a team of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)-Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau researchers in Barcelona, and the MIDAS/National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC) medical image repository as to promote synergies among different projects on the same area.

The meeting presentations will shortly be available.

JISC Repository Deposit Programme Meeting in Birmingham

2011-03-02T04:00:00.000-08:00

A JISC Repository Deposit Programme meeting was held on Mar 1st, 2011 at Maple House Birmingham. Under coordination from Balviar Notay, JISC manager for the Deposit projects, presentations were delivered from representatives of the four presently running projects under JISC Deposit call: DepositMO (Steve Hitchcock, U Southampton), DURA (John Norman, UCam), RePosit (Ian Tilsed, Leeds U) and Kultivate (Marie Therese Gramstadt, VADS). Additional presentations were done for the deposit-related Open Access Repository Repository Junction (OA-RJ) project (Theo Andrew, EDINA), Sword v2 (Richard Jones - Symplectic) and Sonex (Pablo de Castro, Carlos III University Madrid) projects.

Lots of interesting issues were raised and discussed along the set of presentations, and specific teamworking activities were later carried out for promoting cooperation between projects. This was the first opportunity for representatives of all projects involved in the JISC Deposit programme to personally meet the other projects and learn about their progress and potentially complementary findings.

Several complementary visions of deposit were outlined along the workshop: a quite technical one from projects such as DepositMO and Sword, an advocacy-focused approach from RePosit project aiming to increase engagement to repository and a vision of repositories as potential suppliers of the global institutional research output required for REF purposes from DURA.

Steve Hitchcock (DepositMO, implementing Sonex usecase scenario nr 4, Deposit via personal software) delivered a few demo examples of Swordv2-assisted deposit into the DepositMO test repository via local computer file manager, including deposit of previously parsed full-text document ingesting metadata as well and achieving the metadata+object transfer. A key question on document deposit for management vs publishing purposes was also raised along DepositMO presentation: are repositories (or could they evolve into) a proper environment for document management or does the Open Access philosophy prevent them from being used as cooperative tools for example for pre-print edition by a group of authors?

DURA and RePosit projects, implementing Sonex usecase nr 2, CRIS/IR integration, are both dealing with making deposit as easy as possible for the author community by ingesting previoulsy synced inputs from Mendeley and Symplectic Elements into IRs (DURA) and specificallly “increasing engagement with repository” (RePosit) by designing a set of awareness-raising materials and campaigns later to be shared with other projects.

Kultivate, aiming to increase deposit in the arts and design environment, is both the newest and possibly the most innovative project in the strand. Repository development having been strongly focused on research papers as a main research output, work on so far underexploited creative arts materials gives Kultivate the opportunity to set new standards and provide new resources to the Open Access repository community.

Further presentations for projects providing general-purpose deposit infrastructure followed, such as EDINA Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) middleware for discovery and Sword-assisted deposit. OA-RJ is already live-testing its broker for automated transfer of publisher or subject repository content inputs into specific target repositories. Richard Jones described the ongoing process for developing Sword-v2, which will deliver fine-tuned functionalities for metadata+object automated transfer to the rest of the Deposit projects and the wider repository community, resulting in higher deposit rates. Finally, a Sonex presentation stressed the need for re-examining Sonex deposit usecase scenarios for covering new types of materials such as research data, creative arts materials and learning materials. Sonex also suggested common strategy for measuring success of JISC-funded deposit projects being designed at Birmingham City University Evidence Base might include specific questions to be asked to repository managers such as whether any given automated deposit strategy was used for content ingest purposes besides specific strategies for measuring success devised by projects themselves.

The workshop presentations will shortly be available at the Deposit wiki. Once Deposit projects are completed another programme meeting will be held for sharing conclusions and examine case studies and success stories as to widely implement resulting solutions.

"On such a full sea are we now afloat"

2011-01-16T04:21:00.000-08:00

Such quotation -from W. Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar'- closed Drs. Eefke Smit's talk "Taking the Current when it Serves: Research Data from the Publisher's Perspective" she delivered along 'Academic Publishing in Europe': the APE 2011 conference, held at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Jan 11-12th, 2011.

Aiming to gather some facts for its ongoing analysis on research data management and its deposit into repositories, Sonex just attended APE2011, a meeting for the publishing industry and its environment held yearly in Berlin since 2006. The conference organisers do regularly publish a brief official report shortly after the event celebration (reports on previous APE editions
available here, report on this edition due shortly).

This particular visit to Berlin offered the chance to attend yet another event besides APE2011: the SOAP Symposium. Final report by the SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project survey was presented along this one-day meeting, held on Jan 13th in the Goethe Room of the renowned Harnack-Haus in Berlin. The SOAP project describes and analyses the open access publishing landscape as well as exploring the risks and opportunities of the transition to open access publishing for libraries, publishers and funding agencies - see preliminary survey results, final report will be available as of next March.

The conference programme for APE2011, entitled "Smarter Publishing in the New Decade", included promising topics such as evolution of peer-review and ways to improve it, the so-called data deluge, business opportunities in China and how Open Access is becoming increasingly mainstream within the publishing environment. Discussions on those matters were lively both at round tables and at lunch pauses. Sonex interest being mainly on research data management, this report will subsequently focus on presentations and debates on the subject.

On Tuesday Jan 11th afternoon, a session was held on “The Data Deluge: to Drown or to Swim?”, chaired by Bob M. Campbell. Herbert Gruttenmaier, INIST-CNRS, started his presentation "Helping to Ride: a look at data sharing and access policies" by reminding that, since we were in Berlin, the definition of an Open Access Contribution on page 1 of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge includes “raw data and metadata”. Some highlights from his talk were:

There is a large number of Data Sharing Policies being defined by administrations, institutions, funding agencies and publishers themselves under the guideline "data should be made as freely and widely available as possible". See for instance NSF’s requirement for submission of data management plans of May 10th, 2010, under general policy statement “Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants”.
Or the very recent (Jan 10th, 2011) commitment by a group of major international funders of public health research to “work together to increase the availability of data emerging from our funded research, in order to accelerate advances in public health”.

Publishers such as BioMed Central were featured as high-profile supporters of Open Data (see Dec 11th, 2010 post at this blog), and NPG editorial policy on dataset sharing was specifically mentioned along the talk, as well as the Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing statement that “Raw research data should be made freely available to all researchers”. Finally, discipline-based data policies such as PaN-Data Scientific data Policy Draft for Scientific Data Management Framework at European Photon and Neutron Facilities or the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) adopted in a coordinated fashion by Dryad partner journals.

Not everything is that simple though: the Nov 2009 "Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences” RIN report shows that researchers are not so eager to share their data with others, and that ‘one-size-ﬁts-all’ information and data sharing policies may not achieve the goals there are aiming for, namely scientiﬁcally productive and cost-efﬁcient information use in life sciences.

Drs. Eefke Smit, International Association of STM Publishers, provided a counterexample for these growing data sharing policies by publishers along her talk on "Research Data from the Publisher's Perspective" by describing the Journal of Neuroscience policy of no longer taking supplementary material from authors since Nov 1st, 2010, the procedure posing too heavy a burden on paper reviewers.
She also warned of the so-called data deluge, according to which tera- and petabite sized datasets will increase their share in research projects in upcoming years.
However, when researchers are asked where they would like to submit their research data, the answer is more often than not "publishers". This brings along the issue of research data preservation: results of an internal survey by STM Publishers show what she called “an improvable situation” with regard to preservation.

Planned talk “Data Publishing in the Context of the ICSU World Data System” by Dr. Michael Diepenbroek, Director of WDC-MARE/PANGAEA, University of Bremen, went finally off the conference programme. However, the next speaker, Dr. Jan Brasse, Managing Director of DataCite, provided some information on the progress of one of the main databases for research data in the geosciences area, by for instance stating there was “a wide cooperation between Elsevier and PANGAEA via DOI-based external links from online papers” at the former’s platforms. This kind of cooperation between publishers and international databases for handling research data might be useful for tacking the abovementioned data preservation issues.
Dr. Brasse, affiliated with the German National Library of Science and Technology Hannover, described as well the evolution of the DataCite international project as it gets carried out by local member institutions: as of Dec’10, over 1M records are already registered with DOI names at datacite.org. Perspectives for the project include setting up of a Central Metadata Base as of Jun'11; DataCite becoming a harvest point for third parties such as WoS; and cooperation via CrossRef for data-article lookup.

The data management session ended with the talk on “Managing Publication and Research Data: the eSciDoc Research Infrastructure” by Dr. Malte Dreyer from Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL). eSciDoc is as a joint project of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), with the aim to realize a next-generation platform for communication and publication in research organization. Further eSciDoc projects mentioned along the presentation and dealing with research data management were ‘Astronomer‘s Workbench’ (astronomy), Lifecycle Logger (biochemistry) and BW-eSci(T) for computational linguistics. DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) –in whose development eSciDoc is directly involved- and CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) projects were repeatedly highlighted along the session as leading EU projects on development of digital research infrastructure (including data management) for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

A joint panel discussion was then held after the presentations on research data management, with speakers taking questions from the floor. Alicia Wise, Elsevier Director of Universal Access and former archaeologist raised the issue of costs attached to research data management and who should fund them: it was agreed by the panellists that national funding bodies should assume the cost of data management. Along her question Dr. Wise incidentally mentioned that data management at the archaeological research project she used to work for succeeded only thanks to researchers dedicating 50% of their time to data curation. This aspect of dataset deposit will be examined by Sonex in order to identify alternative (automatic) curation procedures currently being used to relieve researchers of the data curation burden.

The data management issues extended well outside the session specifically devoted to them and into the Innovation session held next day, where Portland Press Adam Marshall presentation on the Semantic Biochemical Journal and Project Utopia at the Manchester School of Computer Science did extensively deal with data handling (see “Calling International Rescue: knowledge lost in literature and data landslide!” at Biochem J. (2009) 424, 317–333 for a review on “how to provide new ways of interacting with the literature, and new and more powerful tools to access and extract the knowledge sequestered within it”).

At the end of the data session panel discussion Dr. Eefke Smit synthesized the three challenges of research data management: normalization, standardization and migration. She did also remind the audience of verses following the one quoted in the title of this post:

(…) On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Sonex at the "Digital Library Research and Open Access: Interoperability Strategies" workshop

2010-12-18T02:43:00.000-08:00

After delivering its paper "Handling repository-related interoperability issues" last Sep at the 2nd DL.org workshop in Glasgow, Sonex will be contributing a presentation at the forthcoming DL.org "Digital Library Research and Open Access: Interoperability Strategies" one-day event to be held at the British Academy in London next Feb 4th.

Sonex contribution will be part of this DL.org workshop dealing with digital libraries, Open Access repositories and interoperability among them. Already available conference programme includes presentations on DL. org reference model, DL.org policy and quality interoperability survey, degree of progress of Open Access repositories with regard to interoperability issues in the UK and Europe and research data library management among others.

A preliminary list of discipline-specific projects on research data management

2010-12-12T19:26:00.000-08:00

A preliminary list follows of currently running discipline-specific projects and initiatives (as of Dec 2010) dealing with research data management. The list below is not comprehensive, but a sample of ongoing projects, brought together in order to find out potential biases by area in current research data management projects. Should there be relevant projects missing, we’d appreciate a notification for including them as well.

[projects/initiatives listed in alphabetical order]

Project name: ACRID: Advanced Climate Research Infrastructure for Data
Institution/Funder/Manager: U East Anglia, STFC, Met Office, JISC
Project Description: The ACRID Project aims to develop an approach to publishing climate research data in a way that facilitates citing, re-use and the provision of full provenance information for processed data.
Area/Discipline: Climate Science

Project name: ADMIRAL
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Oxford, JISC
Project Description: A data management infrastructure for research across the life sciences
Area/Discipline: Life Sciences

Service/Project name: ADS: Archaeology Data Service
Institution/Funder/Manager: U York, AHRC, JISC, EU (mandated repository for AHRC, NERC)
Service/Project Description: The Archaeology Data Service supports research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology. The ADS promotes good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology, it provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies.
ADS is actively engaged with research projects working with partners in all sectors of UK archaeology.
Area/Discipline: Archaeology

Project name: Global Argo Data Repository
Institution/Funder/Manager: NOAA, NODC (National Oceanographic Data Center), GODAE (Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment), IFREMER (Institute for Research and Exploitation of the Sea)
Project Description: In the year 2000, a global array of approximately 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats, known as the Argo Ocean Profiling Network, was planned as a major component of the ocean observing system. Argo originated from the need to make climate predictions on both short and long time scales and has led to international participation and collaboration to ensure global coverage.
Centers to handle the data collected by profiling floats have been established in a number of countries. These centers normally handle data from their nationally deployed floats, but sometimes provide that service to other countries or organizations. All Argo data will be publicly available in near real-time via the GTS (Global Telecommunications System) and in scientifically quality-controlled form with a few months delay.
Area/Discipline: Marine Sciences, Oceanography

Project name: BlueObelisk
Institution/Funder/Manager: Group of chemists/ programmers/informaticians
Project Description: The Blue Obelisk Data Repository lists many important chemoinformatics data such as element and isotope properties, atomic radii, etc. including references to original literature
Area/Discipline: Chemoinformatics

Project name: BRIL: Biophysical Repositories in the Lab
Institution/Funder/Manager: CeRch-KCL, JISC
Project Description: The BRIL project aims to enhance the repository facilities at the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics at King’s College London by:
- Embedding the repository within the researchers’ day-to-day research and experimental practices
- Allowing data and metadata to be captured in automated fashion
- Allowing the structure of experimental processes as a whole to be captured, modelled and stored within the repository
- Enhancing browse and access facilities and data exchange facilities to increase interoperability.
Area/Discipline: Biophysics

Project name: CAiRO: Curating Artistic Research Output
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Bristol, DCC, JISC
Project Description: Research data created by the UK’s performance and visual arts departments is often rich, technically complex and amazingly varied in nature. This work may include interconnected multimedia records of a single live event or software which exhibits complex behaviours dependant upon the choices made by a viewer. The CAiRO project, funded as part of the wider JISC Managing Research Data programme, aims to offer data management skills tailored to the special requirements of the arts researcher-practitioner.
Area/Discipline: Creative Arts

Project name: The CEACS Data Library
Institution/Funder/Manager: CEACS Library, Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (CEACS), Instituto Juan March, Madrid, Spain
Project Description: The CEACS Data Library provides support to its research community in conducting quantitative research with primary and secondary data. The Data Library has a collection of over 2,000 secondary research datasets from major data centres. The service supports research data management through a thematic website, one to one support and a Dataverse data repository to help with the management, sharing and preservation of the data produced by researchers.
Area/Discipline: Social Sciences

Project name: Data Conservancy: A New Vision for Data-Driven Science
Institution/Funder/Manager: National Science Foundation (NSF), Johns Hopkins University (Lead institution)
Project Description: The Data Conservancy (DC) embraces a shared vision: scientific data curation is a means to collect, organize, validate and preserve data so that scientists can find new ways to address the grand research challenges that face society.
Area/Discipline: Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences and Social Sciences

Project name: DataONE
Institution/Funder/Manager: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Project Description: DataONE was conceived to ensure preservation and access to multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national data about life on earth and the environment that sustains this life. It was recognized from the outset that such data are often difficult to discover, access, integrate and analyze.
Area/Discipline: Earth & Life Sciences

Project name: DataTrain
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Cambridge, ADS, DCC, JISC
Project Description: The DataTrain project aims to build on findings and tools developed in the Incremental project (JISC 07/09 funding strand), to design discipline-focused data-management training modules for post-graduate courses in Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Area/Discipline: Archaeology, Social Anthropology

Project name: DATUM for Health: Research data management training for health studies
Institution/Funder/Manager: Northumbria U, DCC, JISC
Project Description: This collaborative project seeks to promote research data management skills of postgraduate research students in the health studies discipline through a specially-developed training programme which focuses on qualitative, unstructured research data.
Area/Discipline: Health Sciences

Project name: DMBI: Data Management in Bio-Imaging
Institution/Funder/Manager: The John Innes Centre (BBSRC), Norwich BioScience Institutes, JISC
Project Description: DMBI aims to raise the level of data management/handling for high-throughput bio-imaging, and strengthen the interactions between image data silos, both internally and with partner organisations.
Area/Discipline: Biology/Bio-imaging

Project name: DMP-ESRC: Data management planning for ESRC research data-rich investments
Institution/Funder/Manager: UK Data Archive (UKDA), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Project Description: Data Management Planning (DMP) project aims to increase the data management and sharing capability within the social sciences community.
Area/Discipline: Social Sciences

Project name: DMTpsych: Data Management Training for psychologists
Institution/Funder/Manager: U York, U Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam U, DCC, JISC
Project Description: The aim of DMTpsych is to build capacity and skills within psychology postgraduates relating to research data management. The project builds upon existing research data management materials developed by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) to create discipline-focused postgraduate training materials that can be embedded into postgraduate research training for the psychological sciences.
Area/Discipline: Psychology

Project name: DRYAD UK
Institution/Funder/Manager: British Library, University of Oxford, JISC
Project Description: Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences as published by a Consortium of Journals. Dryad UK aims to expand Dryad into the UK by establishing a UK mirror site and extending service to new publishers and disciplines.
Area/Discipline: Biomedical Sciences

Project name: EDgrid Central: Data Repository System for 3-D Full-Scale Earthquake Testing Facility
Institution/Funder/Manager: National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan
Project Description: A data repository system called EDgrid Central is designed for storing huge amount of experiment data by using a 3-D full-scale earthquake testing facility. The EDgrid Central prepares large storage capacity and implements a data modeling for the shake test in the backend. The frontend is a portal for users to retrieve the stored data by meta-data search and bulk download. This system uses the NEEScentral developed by the NEES project in the United States by enhancing search and download functionalities, according to the EDgrid users' requirements. The EDgrid Central allows facility sites to have a permanent repository of the shaking table experiment and it also enables civil engineering researchers to share their data and reports in their daily activities.
Area/Discipline: Geophysics

Project name: EIDCSR: Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Oxford, JISC
Project Description: The Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research (EIDCSR) project aims to address the data management and curation requirements of three collaborating research groups in Oxford, by scoping their requirements and embedding selected elements of the digital curation lifecycle, including policy, workflow, and sustainability solutions within the research process. The workflows generated by the project are intended to scale to include other research domains and the outputs should be of use to other research intensive institutions. Project runs until Dec'10.
Area/Discipline: Medical & Life Sciences

Project name: ERIM: Engineering Research Information Management
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Bath, UKOLN, JISC
Project Description: ERIM aims to specify in practical terms how effective data management can be enabled and supported in research projects, particular to support reuse or more broadly what can be thought of as 're-purposing'. The project will look primarily at the engineering research domain.
Area/Discipline: Engineering

Project name: EURO VO: European Virtual Observatory
Institution/Funder/Manager: CNRS, ESO, INAF, U Edinburgh
Project Description: The Virtual Observatory (VO) is an international astronomical community-based initiative. It aims to allow global electronic access to the available astronomical data archives of space and ground-based observatories and other sky survey databases. It also aims to enable data analysis techniques through a coordinating entity that will provide common standards, wide-network bandwidth, and state-of-the-art analysis tools. The EURO-VO project aims at deploying an operational VO in Europe. Its objectives are the support of the utilization of the VO tools and services by the scientific community, the technology take-up and VO compliant resource provision and the building of the technical infrastructure.
Area/Discipline: Astronomy

Project name: FISHnet
Institution/Funder/Manager: Centre for e-Research, King’s College London, JISC
Project Description: Freshwater information sharing network
Area/Discipline: Freshwater Biology

Project name: HALOGEN - History Archaeology Linguistics Onomastics and GENetics
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Leicester, JISC
Project Description: The cross-disciplinary Roots of the British collaboration between scholars in humanities and genetics seeks to interrogate the evidence for the migration and/or continuity of human populations in the British Isles in the distant past. The HALOGEN project will support the data management needs of the researchers involved and thus establish organisational best practice in terms of data management planning and the support of diverse cross-disciplinary research data.
Area/Discipline: Ancient history/Genetics

Project name: I2S2
Institution/Funder/Manager: UKOLN/DCC/Soton/STFC, JISC
Project Description: Infrastructure for integration in structural sciences
Area/Discipline: Chemistry (with a view towards inter-disciplinary application)

Project name: Incremental: A step by step approach to informing, improving, & increasing research data curation practice
Institution/Funder/Manager: Cambridge University Library, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at U Glasgow, DCC, JISC
Project Description: The aim of Incremental is to inform, improve and increase research data curation within UK HEIs, by providing exemplars and resources for others to use. Specific objectives are: (1) to investigate current practices and requirements at each institution; (2) to develop a plan for addressing these requirements; (3) to pilot tools and services at each HEI and then make further adjustments and recommendations; (4) embed the work within each institution; and (5) to deliver resources and findings to the DCC, DPC and JISC for wider dissemination. In addition to resources, the project will seek to provide information about their cost and sustainability.
Area/Discipline: Archaeology, Chemistry, English, Engineering and Medicine

Project name: IODP: Integrated Ocean Drilling Program
Institution/Funder/Manager: National Science Foundation (NSF), Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)
Project Description: IODP is an international marine research program that explores Earth's history and structure recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks, and monitors subseafloor environments. IODP builds upon the earlier successes of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), which revolutionized our view of Earth history and global processes through ocean basin exploration.
The IODP oversees repositories around the world. Samples are distributed according to ODP and IODP policies.
Area/Discipline: Marine Sciences

Project name: MaDaM
Institution/Funder/Manager: Manchester eResearch Centre, JISC
Project Description: Pilot data management infrastructure for biomedical researchers
Area/Discipline: Biomedical Sciences

Project name: Managing Research Data: Gravitational Waves (MRD-GW)
Institution/Funder/Manager: STFC, University of Glasgow, JISC
Project Description: MRD-GW aims to examine the way in which Big Science data is managed, and produce recommendations as appropriate. Gravitational Wave (GW) data generated by the LIGO Scientific Consortium (LSC) will be used as a case-study.
Area/Discipline: Particle physics/Astronomy

Project name: PANGAEA
Institution/Funder/Manager: Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), DFG
Project Description: Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data
Area/Discipline: Earth Sciences

Project name: PEG-BOARD
Institution/Funder/Manager: School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, JISC
Project Description: Palaeoclimate and environment data generation - building open access to research data
Area/Discipline: Palaeoclimatology

Project name: Quixote
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Cambridge/CSIC
Project Description: The main objective/vision of the Quixote project is to design, test and deploy a modular, open source system of tools that allow computational chemistry data (now sitting in the darkness of individual hard-disks) to be organized, shared, and queried
Area/Discipline: Quantum Chemistry

Project name: Research Data MANTRA
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Edinburgh/JISC
Project Description: Aims to develop open, online learning materials which reflect best practice in research data management grounded in three disciplinary contexts: social science, clinical psychology, and geoscience. The resulting materials will be embedded in three participating postgraduate programmes and made available through the Transkills programme for use by all postgraduate and early career researchers as well as made available generally through an open license. In addition to web-based 'chapters' that students can work through at their own pace, the course will include video interviews with leading academics about data management challenges, and practical exercises in handling data in four software analysis environments: SPSS, NVivo, R and ArcGIS.
Area/Discipline: Social and political science, Geoscience, Clinical psychology

Project name: SageCite: Citing network models of disease and associated data
Institution/Funder/Manager: UKOLN, U Manchester, British Library, JISC
Project Description: SageCite will develop and test a Citation Framework linking data, methods and publications. The domain of bio-informatics provides a case study, and the project builds on existing infrastructure and tools. Citations of complex network models of disease and associated data will be embedded in leading publications, exploring issues around the citation of data including the compound nature of datasets, description standards and identifiers.
Area/Discipline: Bioinformatics

Project name: ShareGeo Open
Institution/Funder/Manager: EDINA, JISC
Project Description: ShareGeo Open is a spatial data repository that promotes data sharing between creators and users of geospatial data
Area/Discipline: Geography

Project name: SPQR: supporting productive queries for research
Institution/Funder/Manager: KCL, U Edinburgh, Humboldt U Berlin, JISC
Project Description: The overall aim is to investigate the potential of linked data for integrating datasets related to classical antiquity, in particular addressing the particular challenges raised by our material – its incompleteness, uncertainty and fuzziness. We will achieve this by developing mechanisms for breaking data out of silos and exposing it as linked data, using standard ontologies, and in particular the Europeana Data Model, as the semantic “glue” for linking data into a wider network of knowledge. The ultimate objective will be to create a common corpus or “RDF warehouse” of linked Classics data that can be explored, searched and enhanced by further annotations.
Area/Discipline: Classics, Epigraphy and Archaeology

Project name: SUDAMIH
Institution/Funder/Manager: University of Oxford, JISC
Project Description: Supporting data management infrastructure for the Humanities
Area/Discipline: Humanities

Project name: TARDIS
Institution/Funder/Manager: Monash University, Australian National Data Service (ANDS), University of Sidney and some other Australian institutions
Project Description: TARDIS is a multi-institutional collaborative venture that aims to facilitate the archiving and sharing of raw X-ray diffraction images (collectively known as a 'dataset') from the protein crystallography community.
Area/Discipline: Crystallography

Project name: VAMDC Project: Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre
Institution/Funder/Manager: EU, CNRS, CMSUC, UCL, OU, UNIVIE, UU, KOLN, INAF, QUB, AOB, ISRAN, RFNC-VNIITF, IAO, IVIC, INASAN
Project Description: VAMDC aims at building an interoperable e-Infrastructure for the exchange of atomic and molecular data. It embraces on the one hand scientists from a wide spectrum of disciplines in atomic and molecular (AM) Physics with a strong coupling to the users of their AM data (astrochemistry, atmospheric physics, plasmas) and on the other hand scientists and engineers from the ICT community used to deal with deploying interoperable e-infrastructure.
Area/Discipline: Astrophysics

Project name: WissGrid: Grid for Science
Institution/Funder/Manager: DFG, U Göttingen, Astrophysikalisches Institut (AIP), Alfred-Wegener-Institut (AWI), Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY), Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GmbH (DKRZ), Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik (ZIB), Universitätsmedizin Göttingen (UMG), Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SUB), Technische U Dortmund (UDO), U Heidelberg, U Trier, U Wuppertal
Project Description: WissGrid’s objective is to establish long-term organisational and technical D-Grid structures for the academic world. WissGrid combines the heterogeneous needs from a variety of scientific disciplines and develops concepts for the long-term sustainable use of the organisational and technical grid infrastructure. In this context, the project aims to strengthen the organisational cooperation of scientists in the grid and to lower the entry barriers for new community grids.
Area/Discipline: Astrophysics, High Energy Physics, Climate Research, Medicine

Project name: XYZ Project
Institution/Funder/Manager: U Cambridge/IUCr/BioMed Central/Open Knowledge Foundation, JISC
Project Description: The XYZ Project will create a demonstrator of a new workflow for publishing data in support of full-text. The author prepares data for publication (if possible with validation) in a third-party trusted repository before the paper is submitted to a publisher. Our software will manage the deposition, release to reviewers, dis-embargo and for conventional publication or as a data journal
Area/Discipline: Crystallography

Besides this preliminary set of discipline-specific research data-related running projects -to be shortly enriched by Sonex with a complementary list of general purpose projects dealing with research data management- a thorough list of open data repositories for all areas may be found at the data repository section of the Open Access Directory (OAD).

Hrynaszkiewicz & Cockerill "In defence of supplemental data files"

2010-12-11T13:05:00.000-08:00

A valuable text on Open Research Data was published last Fri Dec 10th by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and Matt Cockerill at the BioMed Central blog. International initiatives for data sharing such as DataCite are mentioned in the article, along with plenty of other interesting references.

Another article on Open Data by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz was recently released in BMC Research Notes: "A call for BMC Research Notes contributions promoting best practice in data standardization, sharing and publication".

SONEX and Research Data: new deposit usecase scenarios

2010-11-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

A SONEX meeting was held last Sat Nov 20th at JISC Office in Brettenham House, London. The meeting was intented to produce some feedback on the RFC version of the DL.org Technology and Methodology Digital Library Cookbook. SONEX feedback on featured interoperability solutions was mainly focused on enhancing the Sword protocol description in the Cookbook as to cover functionality updates in the new version of Sword.

Richard Jones (SONEX-Symplectic), Balviar Notay (JISC manager for SONEX) and Pablo de Castro (SONEX-Carlos III Univ Madrid) at SONEX meeting in Brettenham House

The second half of the SONEX meeting was devoted to preliminary analysis of deposit into Open Access repositories of raw research data produced either as specific research output or as supplementary material of research publications. Raw data as a further SONEX usecase deposit scenario was already included in the list of issues for the SONEX Bird-of-Feather session held at the Open Repositories Wokshop (OR2010) last July in Madrid, where it was identified as 'the missing piece in the general deposit picture' at the time.

Some deposit-related projects are already running since Jul 2010 along the JISC Deposit Call (JISCdepo), but none of them so far is dealing with deposit of research data. However, dataset handling is already being considered as a forthcoming candidate for Sword-based transfer, and preliminary analysis of this new deposit usecase scenario may well be partially carried out under the SONEX umbrella.

Some of the discussed ideas on research data and their deposit via Sword into repositories follow:

- A JISCdepo meeting will be held in early Mar 2011 as an internal coordination event for JISC Deposit Call projects. It's a good opportunity for SONEX to fine-tune analysis of usecase scenarios at running projects, as well as for sharing potential new deposit usecases arising both from the Kultivate project (digital versions of creative works ie non-textual materials) and the research data-based approach.

- Regarding deposit of research data into repositories, the DRYAD international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences was highlighted as a pioneering implementation of infrastructure for research data filing and preservation. DRYAD acts as a kind of PubMed Central for research data – with an equivalent mandate by a group of 50 journals (so far) to their authors for depositing publication-related research data into this specific repository (besides archiving them in their IR or with the publisher).

- The JISC-funded DRYAD UK project was also discussed. DRYAD UK, currently being developed within the JISC Managing Research Data (JISCMRD) programme, is planning to expand Dryad into the UK by both establishing a UK mirror site and extending service to new publishers and disciplines.

- A JISC Managing Research Data Programme (JISCMRD) International Workshop will be held in Mar 2011 for analysis and evaluation of outputs and progress of the JISCMRD Programme. There will be a place in the Workshop programme for issues related to research data, such as citation, deposit and metadata/identifier exchange with publishers. SONEX is expected to bring in some input into some of those subjects.

- Regarding creation of research data management infrastructure for collection, digital organization, metadata annotation and controlled sharing of datasets, the ADMIRAL project (A Data Management Infrastructure for Research Across the Life sciences) was identified as the main presently running initiative to be followed. DataPac, an idea for a standard data shipping container for submitting research data with identifier and other information in RDF and HTML formats, was mentioned too as a potential complementary infrastructure to ADMIRAL.

In terms of SONEX deposit usecase analysis, deposit of research data poses a double usecase framework,

R2R usecase scenario (IR to DRYAD, other)

Publisher to repository usecase scenario

as well as a set of Sword-related procedural issues to be checked from a SONEX perspective, such as:

metadata-related issues – very case-specific and different from metadata standards being used for research papers (previous work on the subject done by JISCMRD MRDonto Group: “Metadata for Datasets: Identifiers and Ontologies”)

SONEX should definitely NOT get into identification schemas for datasets – DOIs should do for identification purposes

issue of attached file sizes – should deposit by reference be considered instead/besides binary data transfer?

At what point along the publication lifecycle should dataset deposit take place? Picturing the process via workflow diagrams would help

How should Sword deal with this particular deposit usecase?

Some interesting examples of international initiatives dealing with dataset management are also being examined by SONEX, such as:

- PANGAEA [Germany]: Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data, see example dataset with attached DOI

- [Dutch] NARCIS (National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System) FAQ page contains info on handling datasets.

Further references on submission of research data to repositories:

Research Remix blog, by Heather Piwowar

JISC XYZ project for publishing data in support of full-text

"A Scientist and the Web": Peter Murray-Rust's blog - Archive for the 'data' Category

"SPARC Digital Repositories meeting includes session on open data" (blog post at IASSIST website, 2010/11/10)

'Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research' (EIDCSR) project blog

6th International Data Curation Conference (Chicago, IL, Dec 6-8th, 2010) - Programme

"Riding the Wave: How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data": Final Report of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data: a submission to the European Commission (Oct 2010)

Sonex to contribute to RFC version of DL.org Cookbook

2010-10-26T04:51:00.000-07:00

As of Oct 14th the DL.org project released the RFC version of its 'Digital Library Technology and Methodology Cookbook'.

According to DL.org, "the Cookbook is aimed at collecting and describing a portfolio of best practices and pattern solutions to common challenges faced when it comes to developing large-scale interoperable Digital Library systems. The current version of the Cookbook should not be considered neither authoritative nor final but rather as a 'work in progress' with the aim of enhancing it through external feedback".

After the Sonex work was presented last September at the 2nd DL.org workshop held in Glasgow, Sonex reached an agreement with DL.org as to provide technical feedback on the Cookbook regarding those usecase scenarios identified by Sonex.

SONEX presentation in Valencia, Spain

2010-10-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

The 10th REBIUN Workshop on Digital Proyects will be held Oct 7-8, 2010 in Valencia, Spain. Among the technical presentations scheduled for the workshop, there is one on Sonex called 'Interoperabilidad y Repositorios: el Grupo de Trabajo SONEX' (Interoperability and Repositories: the SONEX Workgroup).

In the Sonex presentation, to be delivered on Thu Oct 7th, the main Sonex worklines will be discussed, as well as incipient implementations of Sonex usecase scenarios in Spanish Institutional repositories.

BMC Automated Article Deposit feature

2010-10-06T04:11:00.000-07:00

As of Sep 29th, BioMed Central Update announced BMC Shared Support Membership as a new kind of low-cost membership for sharing article processing fees between institutions and their research teams. Main issue from a Sonex point of view in this new type of BMC membership is it includes a feature for Automated Article Deposit into repositories via Sword, by which "any article published [in BMC open access journals] will be automatically deposited into the Shared Support Member's institutional repository". This means extension to further institutions for the http://sonexworkgroup.blogspot.com/2010/04/biomed-central-partners-with-mit.html announced last Apr 29th.

See BMC Automated Article Deposit for further information on this deposit service and BMC customers entitle to it, and BMC Member list by country to check for potential institutional users.

SONEX at the Kultur/Kultivate workgroup meeting in London

2010-09-15T02:03:00.000-07:00

by Richard Jones

On 8th September 2010 the JISC-funded Kultur project group gathered for a meeting at the JISC Offices in London, to carry out some post-project discussions and to look to the future with the Kultivate project. During the meeting William Nixon, University of Glasgow, presented "Minding your P's and Q's: Enrich-ing Enlighten at the University of Glasgow" on their work at the Enrich project and the enhancement of Enlighten Institutional Repository, while Richard Jones from Symplectic (and SONEX) presented "A whirlwind tour of repository deposit technology and use cases". This latter presentation covered his work at Symplectic and the Symplectic Repository Tools deposit technology (c.f. the CRIS to Repository use case), as well as the current state of the SWORD 1.3 standard and the future of SWORD through version 2.0. He also then presented some slides on SONEX describing the key identified use cases and suggestions on the way that Creative and Applied arts might engage with the SONEX process.

Some key realisations from this meeting for SONEX are that:

1) The deposit use cases in Creative and Applied Arts may not be significantly different from the use cases in STM, but the devil will be in the details

2) CRIS systems are being used to some degree in Arts Institutions, and undoubtedly there is work which will be considered research in these fields, but automatic acquisition of content for these systems is virtually impossible, because ...

3) There are no comprehensive or even substantial Creative and Applied Arts data sources online, because ...

4) The publishing lifecycle for the Creative and Applied Arts is not only significantly different to STM but also non-standard across the discipline. It was suggested, for example, that YouTube and Vimeo were likely to be some of the largest repositories of research outputs from these fields.

It is hoped that if the 4th JISCdepo project goes ahead it should be easier for SONEX to engage in this field. In the meantime, any people working in Creative and Applied Arts should feel very welcome to contact SONEX members with a view to understanding the variations in the standard deposit use cases which would meet their needs.

Sonex presentation at the 2nd DL.org workshop on Digital Library Interoperability

2010-09-14T01:18:00.000-07:00

(picture by: Anna Nika, University of Athens)

The paper 'Handling Repository-Related Interoperability Issues: The Sonex Workgroup' was presented last week at the 2nd DL.org workshop held in Glasgow in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2010, Sep 6-10, 2010). The DL.org workshop was scheduled under title "Making Digital Libraries Interoperable: Challenges and Approaches" and it featured several presentations by DL.org working groups on the DL Reference Model, such as DL content, functionality, users, architecture, quality & policy (see programme). An invited talk by MS Research Alex Wade, "Digital Library Interoperability: An Industrial Perspective", was also held, where most recent MS developments in the area of DL interoperability were summarized (Zentity, Article Authoring Add-in for Word, DepositMO Project, MS Academic Search or the WorldWide Telescope among others).

The Sonex presentation was delivered on Fri Sep 9th by Peter Burnhill and Pablo de Castro along the workshop's Day I. Sonex approach to interoperability being quite pragmatic in scope, it fitted in well alongside DL.org's more theoretical-founded model. Complementary approaches by both initiatives may in fact offer perspectives for further collaboration between them after this DL.org workshop.

RepoFringe 2010: lots of interesting presentations plus a Sonex Pecha Kucha

2010-09-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

The 3rd edition of the Repository Fringe was just held in Edinburgh along Sep 2nd and 3rd 2010. This new edition of the RepoFringe (see programme) was a good opportunity to learn about the most recent advancements regarding repositories in the UK, and new ideas for their development were shared in an informal, stimulating atmosphere. This edition's success story was undoubtedly EPrints Bazaar app-store for its new version 3.2, as live demoed by David Tarrant and Patrick McSweeney, with Les Carr's cooperation as an inspired pre-recorded speaker. EPrints will also shortly release its CERIF4REF plugin in order to comply with the R4R schema, thus proving that repository software is swiftly progressing towards anticipating user needs by closing the gap with CRIS systems from a research output perspective.

Further talks were also held at RF2010 on CRIS systems and IRs. A lot of universities do already have CRIS systems running, and some voices in the community start wondering whether CRIS systems might eventually replace institutional repositories as an "entrance door" to the institutional research output. Projects like RePosit (see Queen Mary University of London Sara Molloy's presentation for more info) on the contrary are exploring ways for batch ingestion of contents flowing from CRIS systems into a currently low-populated array of repositories.

Quite a number of other subjects were amusingly dealt with by other speakers, such as timestamping the web through the Memento project as presented by Herbert van de Sompel (LANL), Topic Models by Michael Fourman (University of Edinburgh Informatics Dept), or Repositories and data at Closing Keynote by Kevin Ashley (DCC).

RF2010 had also its traditional 20-slide-20-secs-per-slide Pecha Kucha sessions once again. There was a Pecha Kucha on the work by Sonex on Fri Sep 3rd, and projects like Enlighten, Jorum, Open Access Repository Junction, ERA, ShareGeo and some others were represented at this light speed presentation variety as well.

On Sep 1st a SHERPA RoMEO API workshop was also held by Peter Millington, Jane H. Smith and colleagues from Nottingham at the e-Science Institute facilities in Edinburgh as a RepoFringe pre-event. As presented last July at Open Repositories Conference in Madrid, major improvements in the RoMEO service are being worked at, and this workshop was an opportunity to get feedback from the RoMEO API users on its performance and suggestions on possible enhancements for version 3 currently in its final stages of development (due Autumn 2010). There were also interesting presentations from outside the UK on the implementation of RoMEO mirrors such as SHERPA RoMEO deutsch in Germany and service internationalisation was extensively discussed along the meeting (Portugal and Spain were scoped as potential areas for development of specific interfaces). An online survey on the RoMEO API was previously distributed among the workshop delegates and its results were discussed and analysed in fruitful specific breakout sessions.

From a Sonex perspective, the RoMEO service does fit into the Sonex proposal for a distributed national- or regional-level automatic ingest system based on an array of brokers dealing with publisher- or funder-driven ingest of contents into a network of national or regional institutional repositories. From this point of view, RoMEO, such as other general-purpose services as OpenDOAR or the broker itself, are pieces of the required infrastructure for this approach to grow real. Find more information about this Sonex proposal in the Sonex paper 'Handling Repository-Related Interoperability Issues: the SONEX Workgroup' to be presented in Glasgow later this month at the 2nd DL.org workshop "Making Digital Libraries interoperable: challenges and approaches".

IRs as institutional assets for future Research Assessment Exercises

2010-08-03T03:45:00.000-07:00

Beyond their relevance for open access dissemination of research output, the new role of Institutional Repositories as a key institutional research infrastructure for present or future Research Assessment Exercises was extensively debated last month at the Open Repositories Conference in Madrid (some good posts on OR10 available at CAIRSS). For this purpose, IRs should be embedded into the general institutional information research system, which brings up a series of integration/interoperability issues that lie at the heart of the Sonex work.

See below an analysis of several CRIS-IR integration possibilities for creating an institutional research information infrastructure that will live up to the challenge posed by future research assessment exercises.

Considerations on the role of CERIF standard were intentionally left out of the picture, as some debate is still taking place on whether or not it should be the base standard for CRIS-IR integration. Most implementations available have until now
chosen CERIF-based integration strategies to tackle the issue, but from ad-hoc light-CERIF versions to non-CERIF solutions whatsoever, there's still a high level of diversity in the way institutions are facing this challenge. At the same time,
CERIF4REF is being steadily worked out at KCL, and CERIF architecture is also being gradually brought into ePrints new versions.

A variety of research information system implementation usecases for RAE/REF purposes was also shown at Peter Burnhill's (Sonex/EDINA) "Repository Update UK" presentation at JISC/CNI meeting last month: from IRs being used as REF-gateways to the challenge it poses in terms of open access availability of contents, a whole set of issues arise as IRs undergo enhancement for fulfilling their new role.

First projects selected at jiscDEPO call

2010-07-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

Some selected bids for JISC Deposit Call (tagged as jiscDEPO) on "Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research" were announced along the Open Repositories 2010 Conference held in Madrid from Jul 6-9th. The jiscDEPO call was released last Mar 9th and according to its timeline, all selected projects should already be running (their estimated start due June 2010).

Following projects have been selected at the jiscDEPO call as of today - with some extra one still to come:

DepositMO: Modus Operandi for Repository Deposits. Developed by teams from the University of Southampton (Lead Institution) and Edinburgh University, and with a close liaison with Microsoft, the DepositMO projects aims to create a repository deposit workflow connecting the user’s computer desktop, especially popular apps such as MS Office, with digital repositories based on EPrints and DSpace. A first DepositMO presentation was delivered by David Tarrant (U Southampton) at OR2010.

RePosit: positing a new kind of deposit. The RePosit Project seeks to increase uptake of a web-based repository deposit tool embedded in a researcher-facing publications management system. Institutions involved in RePosit are University of Leeds (Chair), Keele University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Exeter and University of Plymouth, with close connection to Symplectic Ltd as commercial partner.

DURA: Direct User Repository Access. The DURA project, lead by the University of Cambridge with Mendeley Ltd and Symplectic Ltd as consultant firms, aims to embed institutional deposit into the academic workflow at almost no cost to the researcher, by using Mendeley and Symplectic tools to allow researchers to synchronise their personal research collections with institutional systems.

The Sonex workgroup will be supplying its conceptual framework on deposit usecases to these projects and contributing to their coordination via the jiscDEPO project blog planet to be available shortly.

Some topics for Sonex BoF at OR10

2010-07-02T02:37:00.000-07:00

Place, date and time for Sonex Bird-of-Feather session to be held next week at Open Repositories Conference 2010 in Madrid are already set: Sonex BoF will take place next Wed July 7th at Room "Reino Unido B" from 17:30 to 19 hrs.

Here are some topics to be discussed along the session:

The growing number of deposit-related initiatives and events should be properly summarized, classified and advertised somewhere: the Sonex website could widen its present coverage in order to play that role, especially in the US & Canada (out of Europe would probably be more accurate, Berlin 8 Open Access conference 2010 being held in Beijing next Oct), for keeping an eye on progresses wherever they may take place. Some ideas are already available.

Main classes of deposit-related initiatives: Publisher-driven & CRIS transfers. Is the Sonex classification thorough enough? Are there any other possible groups that weren't accounted for and left under the 'Other' general section? Are all classes being adequately covered by some ongoing deposit-related project? What about e-Research repositories (datasets + software)? Could they be the [Sonex] missing piece of the institutional research systems integration jigsaw? Input on the issue by a representative of some related initiative attending the BoF could help.

Common challenges in publisher-driven deposit initiatives. Re-usable procedures: NLM DTDs. The filtering strategy. SWORD endpoint (scarce) implementation and how OpenDOAR/ROAR may help. Author and institution persistent identifiers. Processing of citations. Everything being developed at the same time doesn't make things easier.

CERIF as a spreading standard for CRIS/IR integration. Different ways for achieving the objective, and how the REF affects the whole environment. Hybrid CRIS/IRs: an alternative procedure.

8th International JISC/CNI meeting 2010: "Managing data in difficult times"

2010-07-01T04:12:00.000-07:00

Along Jul 1-2, 2010, JISC and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are holding their 8th International meeting 2010 in Edinburgh, under title "Managing data in difficult times". This meeting joins experts from the US, Europe and the UK to examine policies, strategies, technologies and infrastructure to manage research and teaching data in a fast changing technological and economic environment.

Topics for sessions include: Cloud Computing; Innovation in Learning and Teaching; Open Data Policies; Shared Services; Repositories; Digital Content and Institutional Planning; Resource Discovery; Digital Preservation; e-Science (see meeting programme).

Peter Burnhill from EDINA National Data Centre Edinburgh and member of the Sonex workgroup will deliver a presentation on "Repositories Update UK" at the Repositories update session on Conference Day 2 - which includes also a talk on "Repositories Update US" by Sandy Payette, DuraSpace. Presentation by Peter Burnhill will be shortly available here.

CRIS2010 Aalborg: a brief report

2010-06-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

The 10th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (CRIS2010), "Connecting Science with Society: The Role of Research Information in a Knowledge-Based Society", was held last week (June 2nd-5th) at Aalborg University, Denmark. Organised by the euroCRIS association, the conference "aimed to give insight into the role of CRIS in terms of shaping the research agenda and transferring research outcomes from the laboratory to areas of usage and application". Updated information on projects and initiatives for devising CRIS-based National and Institutional Research Information Systems was presented, see conference programme. CRIS2010 presentations will be shortly posted at the conference website.

Some comments below on the outcome of discussions at CRIS2010:

All across Europe and beyond, CERIF is spreading as an increasingly accepted standard for building Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) both at national and institutional levels. Previously existing databases and management systems at HEIs are frequently undergoing adaption to CERIF.

CERIF-based National Research Information Systems for research management and assessment (such as NARCIS in The Netherlands, Frida in Norway, U-GOV in Italy or the USDA-CRIS in the United States) usually rely on CERIF-compliant Institutional CRISs for supplying the underlying institutional information. This often leads to a two-way strategy for infrastructure development, where National and Institutional Systems are simultaneously being built.

As a consequence, there is an increasing number of CERIF-compliant National Research Information Systems in operation, and more of them are in progress (eg DeGóis in Portugal or SEMAT in Iran).

At institutional level there is also a growing trend towards adoption of CERIF-based solutions, either developed inhouse or based on CERIF-compliant commercial CRISs: there are already several examples of ePrints being upgraded to PURE (presently the most successful of such commercial solutions) in the UK and elsewhere. This trend leads to a variety of resources available at institutional level depending on the adopted strategy: some institutions have plain CRIS systems, others work with CRIS/IR integrated solutions and finally there are also some universities running CERIF-based enhanced-IRs.

The Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) is by no means a closed standard at this point, but it benefits from interaction with existing National, Subject and Institutional Research Information Systems in order to "epitaxially" enrich its description features for providing solutions to various system needs.

A wide array of commercial solutions is presently flourishing around the area of institutional research system implementation or enhancement, such as Atira PURE, Avedas Converis or Symplectic Repository Tools to mention just some examples.

There are interoperability issues still to be tackled at various points of CRIS/OAR and CRIS/CRIS integration, but remarkable progress is underway, both from publicly-funded international projects and from private companies.

The presently soundest example of Author ID standard, Dutch DAI, having been driven by institutional integration purposes, CERIF & euroCRIS initiatives could possibly bring in a new momentum for solving pending Author ID issues, as it is a basic requirement for operation of both National and Institutional Research Information Systems.

Despite the fact that "everything being seemingly developed at the same time doesn't make things easier" (quote from Sonex BoF at OR10 preliminary list of issues), important progresses are clearly taking place worldwide on the field of research information system implementation. Some integrated research system development strategy from planning bodies, particularly at institutional environments, may therefore be useful for adapting to the rapidly changing landscape.

Recently held and upcoming events on CERIF-CRIS/IR integration

2010-05-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

An euroCRIS-organised event related to CERIF-CRIS/IR integration was recently held at CNR Rome, Italy, and forthcoming CRIS2010 will be taking place next June 2nd to 5th in Aalborg, Denmark:

Workshop on CRIS, CERIF and Institutional Repositories: Maximising the Benefit of Research Information for Researchers, Research Managers, Entrepreneurs and the Public (Istituto di ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali, IRPPS, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR, Rome, Italy, May 10-11, 2010).
CRIS2010: Connecting Science with Society: The Role of Research Information in a Knowledge-Based Society (10th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems, Aalborg, Denmark, June 2-5, 2010).

A summary of ongoing deposit-related projects

2010-05-24T02:29:00.000-07:00

A summary of currently running deposit-related projects and initiatives (as of Jun 5th, 2010) is shown in the table below. The list is not intended to be comprehensive, but just a sample of ongoing initiatives known to the Sonex workgroup. Should there be any remarkable deposit-related project missing from the list, it shall be promptly added as soon as we get a notification.

Project name	Institutions/ Organisations	Country(ies)	Contact person
Publisher-driven initiatives
PEER Project	STM-Assoc/ESF/Max Planck G/UGöttingen/INRIA/SURF/ UBielefeld	EU	Julia Wallace (STM)/Foudil Bretel (INRIA)
Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ)	EDINA	UK	Theo Andrew (EDINA)
BMC Deposit into DSpace@MIT	BMC/MIT	UK/US	Matthew Cockerill (BMC)
National & Institutional CRIS/IR integration initiatives
NARCIS	Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)	NL	Elly Dijk (KNAW)
Enrich: Repository and Research System Integration	University of Glasgow	UK	William Nixon (U Glasgow)
CRISPool	University of St. Andrews	UK	Anna Clements (U St. Andrews)
TDC Systems Integration	TCD	IE	Niamh Brennan (TCD)
U-GOV	CINECA Consorzio Interuniversitario	IT	Nicola Bertazzoni (CINECA)
CRIStin	University Centre for Information Technology (USIT-UiO)	NO	Anne Asserson (U Bergen, UiB)
Aramis	State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER)	CH	Beat Sottas (SER)
USDA-CRIS	US Dept Agriculture. National Institute of Food and Agriculture	US	Carolyn Deckers, Juanita Hammond, Teresa Bailey (USDA)
RCAAP/DeGóis Integration	UMIC/FCCN/FCT	PT	Eloy Rodrigues (UMinho)
RIS/IR Integration at UPC	Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)	ES	Jordi Serrano, Toni Prieto (UPC)
CRIS/OAR Interoperability Project	KE/DTU	DK	Mikael K. Elbæk (DTU), Mogens Sandfær (DTIC)
CCLRC Corporate Data Repository (CDR)	Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC)	UK	E. Grabczewski (CCLRC)
SEMAT	Iranian Research Institute for Information Science & Technology (Irandoc)	IR	Omid Fatemi (Irandoc)
Commercial initiatives
Article Authoring Add-in	MS Research	US	Lee Dirks/Alex Wade (MS Research)
Repository tools	Symplectic Ltd	UK	Richard Jones (Symplectic Ltd)
Pure	Atira	DK	Bo Alroe (Atira)
Converis	Avedas	DE	Rudolf Weiss (Avedas)
Enovation Solutions	Enovation	IE	Gavin Henrick (Enovation)
Other
SWORD Project	UKOLN/JISC	UK	Adrian Stevenson (UKOLN), Julie Allinson (U York)
York Digital Library - Integration for the Next Generation (YODL-ING)	University of York/University of Leeds	UK	Julie Allinson (University of York)
EasyDeposit – SWORD deposit tool creator	University of Auckland	NZ	Stuart Lewis (U Auckland)

Sonex Deposit BoF ar OR10 Madrid

2010-05-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

The programme of BoF session proposals for Open Repositories 2010 Conference in Madrid was just released. There will be a Sonex Deposit BoF taking place along the conference (final date & location still to be announced), under following guidelines:

Along last year Sonex workgroup has been devoted to analysis of Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange, that is, of potential deposit processes into repositories for scholarly publications from various sources and related interoperability issues. Several relevant usecases have been selected for following their implementation at institutional environments. After recent publication of Deposit call by JISC (Feb’10), Sonex was assigned the new role of providing support and eventual coordination for selected bids. We are therefore inviting colleagues taking part in ongoing or future deposit-related projects to debate on different approaches, common problems and chances for avoiding redundancies among them.

'Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS: a report', by Richard Jones

2010-05-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

Friday 7th was the joint JISC and ARMA event "Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS", aimed at stirring up some discussion around the relationship and integration between these two kinds of system. Such integration has been talked about for some time, and I find myself recalling the Knowledge Exchange workshop in Utrecht where JISC, in partnership with SURF and DEFF and DFG initiated similar discussions in 2007. It is good to see that this discussion has moved from the domain of Repository, CRIS and CERIF developers into the mainstream of Research and Repository Managers, where requirements can more appropriately be sourced. For this technical observer the event was somewhat too non-technical, but I think this was the intention and for the best.

Andy McGregor from JISC set the scene for the event, giving us a little background on JISC involvement, and talking about different approaches that could be taken to integration, such as the use of CERIF or of Linked Data for the sharing of information. He then passed us over to Simon Kerridge from ARMA, who discussed in a bit more detail what a CRIS is; he also gave us some better terminology that we might prefer to use: RMAS (Research Management and Administration System) and ERA (Electronic Research Administration). The briefing paper that accompanies the event tells us that "by communicating research information more effectively ... the process of sharing data becomes more efficient, duplication of effort is reduced and information becomes more accurate", and this clearly drives the purpose of the day. Particularly, there is no intention here to merge CRIS and Repositories - the two communities have sufficiently different use cases that this is unlikely to happen - but simply to enhance communication between them in the correct way.

Anna Clements then introduced the CRIS that they use at St Andrews, while William Nixon and Valorie McCutcheon from the University of Glasgow presented Enlighten. Particularly, Enlighten is an interesting case as it is based on the EPrints software, and started life as an institutional repository in around 2003, but has now grown into a fully fledged publications management system. The presentations were then wrapped up by Jackie Knowles, from the Welsh Repository Network (the event organisers), who gave us an insight into things that went well and things that didn't during development of CRIS and Repository systems at institutions around the country. The ones that stuck for me were:

Don't overcomplicate your requirements

Don't develop DIY solutions which turn into single points of failure (i.e. ensure they are robust against staff changes)

Ensure that your requirements are well specified and met; she cites an unfortunate and extreme tale of a team who lost their jobs after failing to successfully implement a system which had no formal requirements in the first place!

The afternoon of the event was given over to discussion among delegates, and this observer did not attend due to his position as representing a supplier - the event coordinators felt that without the suppliers present the conversation would be more candid. The results of those discussions should be made available soon, and we'll link them when they are. Meanwhile, I therefore represented Symplectic in the exhibition stall, alongside Avedas, EPrints, Atira, ARMA, ThomsonReuters, IDEATE and DuraSpace; it was busy for much of the afternoon, which I think shows a clear interest in this space at this time.

Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS event

2010-05-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

Last Friday May 7th a joint JISC and ARMA one-day event on repositories and Current Research Information Systems (CRISes) was held at Leeds Metropolitan University. Organised by the Welsh Repository Network (WRN), this event brought together representatives from both research administration and repository management functions within institutions to explore the synergies, overlaps and opportunities in our role of curating institutional research and publication management information.

Following issues -among others- were discussed at the meeting (see event programme for contributions):

Why a CRIS? The perspective from the repository and research management communities
The ideal CRIS: a view from euroCRIS
DIY Success: Case study from the University Glasgow - How repository and research management systems have been successfully integrated
Where did it all go wrong?: Case study on how repository and research management systems have not been so successfully integrated

Tweets about the event were saved, and presentations are already available online as well. Finally, Richard Jones from Sonex workteam was attending the seminar at Leeds Met and will also be delivering a brief report on the main issues dealt with at the event.

BioMed Central partners with MIT Libraries to deposit open access articles using SWORD

2010-04-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

BioMed Central, the leading open access publisher, has worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries to develop an automated system that uses the latest technology to automatically populate MIT's digital repository, DSpace@MIT, with the official version of articles by MIT researchers that have been published in BioMed Central's journals.

In order to make it easier for MIT authors to submit articles to DSpace@MIT, the MIT Libraries worked with BioMed Central to set up an automatic feed of MIT articles, using a version of the Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) protocol. The SWORD protocol allows the institutional repository to receive newly published articles from any of BioMed Central's 200+ journals as soon as they are published, without the need for any effort on the part of the author and streamlining the deposit process for the repository administrator.

In describing the importance of the SWORD integration, Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central's Managing Director said, "Campus open access policies are hugely important, but the effort involved in compliance can be a major obstacle to their success. That is why we think that automated deposit has an important role to play. We hope that this pioneering work by BioMed Central in collaboration with MIT Libraries will encourage other institutions to work with us to establish similar automated feeds, and we encourage other publishers to adopt a similar approach".

Read more at BMC Press release.

Richard Jones joins Sonex workgroup

2010-04-21T08:12:00.001-07:00

After Jim Downing announced last March he would be forced to leave the Sonex workgroup later this year, group members were discussing possible candidates for bringing a similar technical profile into the workgroup. Richard Jones, Head of Repository Systems at Symplectic Ltd, was nr 1 on the resulting list of repository techies. A few weeks after these conversations, Richard has agreed to become part of the Sonex workgroup, and will be contributing his large experience on Publications System's integration with digital repository systems and general interoperability issues to further Sonex analysis of the deposit landscape worldwide.

Richard is Head of Repository Systems at Symplectic Ltd, and is responsible for integrating their research and publications management system (Symplectic Elements) with a variety of digital repository platforms.

Prior to joining Symplectic, Richard built and deployed repository systems for three large universities: the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bergen, and Imperial College London. He also spent some time as a research engineer at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, working with cloud services and content management systems.

Richard is a founder member of the DSpace Committer Group, although is now much less active in that community than he would like. He plays an active role in open standards development; he was on the technical committee defining the Open Archives Initiative Object Re-use and Exchange (OAI-ORE) standard, and has recently taken up technical lead for SWORD standard, in which he has been involved in since near its inception. He is also chair of the Developer Focus group, part of DevCSI representing developers in and around higher education. He has written numerous articles on repository development and Open Access, as well as a book concentrating explicitly on Institutional Repositories.

CRIS/IR integration at Trinity College Dublin

2010-04-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

Several initiatives are presently being developed at various academic institutions across Europe for materialising Sonex usecase nr 2, ie CRIS systems as a source of documents for Institutional Repositories. One of the most successful examples of system integration is taking place at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where integration between TCD in-house developed CERIF-based CRIS and TARA DSpace-based repository is under way (see for instance "CRIS Cross: the repository in the research information system"). APIs for ingest of metadata-only records from international databases such as WoS or PubMed were also developed at TCD as part of the interoperability effort. Finally, TCD solutions are being exported to developing countries via the Irish-African Partnership for Research Capacity Building and eIFL.net.
Contact person at TCD: Niamh Brennan

OA-RJ Multiple Deposit meeting (HEFCE, London, 2010/04/08)

2010-04-14T03:22:00.000-07:00

This meeting aims to debate relevant issues for the already running Open Access-Repository Junction (OA-RJ) project, as a means of advancing with successive phases of it. The meeting, organized by OA-RJ manager Theo Andrew (EDINA), joins up different stakeholders related to OA-RJ, such as publishers (NPG, UKPMC, BMC), funders, IR managers, the Sonex workgroup, the NAMES project, the SWORD protocol and JISC (represented by David Flanders and James Farnhill).

Some meeting conclusions from a Sonex viewpoint (general conclusions summarized by Theo in a post at the OARJ blog):

- The PEER project should be considered as a key reference for OA-RJ, at least at its initial stages, for there are important similarities between both projects. NPG has also taken part in the PEER project, which dealt mainly with publishers depositing authors' manuscripts into an array of IRs, and warns about risk of redundancy at this stage. However, publishers as deposit agents is just one of the OA-RJ lines of work, so overlapping between both projects should be just partial. Nevertheless, whenever PEER previous developments may be reused for OA-RJ purposes, a strong effort should be made to ensure this is done. Sonex may be of great help in achieving some degree of cooperation between both projects.

- The Sonex workgroup may eventually support the OA-RJ project for tackling some of the basic issues at design stage (such as the multiple copy vs one copy+multiple links dilemma or the way deposited items may be kept at the OA-RJ deposit until -and even after- receiving notification from target IRS of the item going live). These points are dealt with in the meeting, but there are still questions remaining and new issues are likely to show up along the project development. If Sonex succeeds in organising the proposed Deposit meeting (initially set for Oct'2010) on ongoing deposit initiatives worldwide, it may also be a good opportunity for discussing different approaches to the same objectives among members of the represented projects.

JISC Deposit Call

2010-04-14T02:05:00.001-07:00

As of Mar 9, 2010, JISC Grant Funding Call 2/10 on "Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research" was released. Strand A in such call relates to Deposit, with the specific objective of "Ensuring take-up of solutions that enable and encourage author deposit of Open Access research outputs into repositories by embedding deposit into research or related practice". Sonex already working on the issue, there is an opportunity for the workgroup to assist projects funded under the JISC Deposit Call by supplying the bigger picture of repository deposit. The possibility of providing a webspace where people interested in deposit can go to learn about deposit work was also suggested.

Upcoming Sonex-related events

2010-04-14T01:57:00.000-07:00

• OR10: The 5th International Conference on Open Repositories (Madrid, Spain, Jul 6-9, 2010)

• CRIS2010: Connecting Science with Society (Aalborg, Denmark, Jun 2-5, 2010)

• Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS (Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK, May 7, 2010)

• Repository Multiple Deposit meeting (London, UK, Apr 8, 2010)

• Readiness for REF (R4R) Workshop (King's College London, Mar 23, 2010)

• OpenAIRE Inaugural Conference (Athens, Greece, Jan 13-14, 2010)

• JISC Deposit Show-and-Tell Barcamp (University College London, Oct 12, 2009)

Meetings held & Documents available

2010-04-14T01:05:00.000-07:00

• International Repository Workshop (Amsterdam, Mar 16-17, 2009)
Repository Handshake strand - Action plan

• Edinburgh workgroup meeting (EDINA, Edinburgh, June 10, 2009)
Notes on meeting
Repository Handshake (actor-based) use case scenarios: a summary
Notes from whiteboard

• OAI6 Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (CERN, Geneva, June 17-19, 2009)
The Repository Handshake - a followup

• Copenhagen workgroup meeting (DTU, Copenhagen, Aug 12, 2009)
Notes on meeting

• Madrid workgroup meeting (CSIC, Madrid, Nov 2, 2009)
Notes on meeting

• Informal workgroup meeting in Cambridge (Cambridge, UK, Mar 21, 2010)

Related projects

2010-04-14T00:54:00.000-07:00

The following projects are dealing with some kind of deposit action into repositories, and are therefore related to the Sonex initiative:

• JISC-EDINA’s Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) Project

• PEER Project

• Knowledge Exchange ‘CRIS/OAR Interoperability Project’ for defining a CERIF-based metadata exchange format between CRIS and Institutional Repositories,

• SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit
Sword overview
Sword2 final report

• JISC-Heriot-Watt University’s JournalTOCsAPI project,

• JISC-The Deposit Plait

• JISC-EM-Loader

• JISC-EIDeR (Enhanced ingest to digital e-research repositories)

• EU OpenAIRE

Sonex timeline

2010-04-14T00:49:00.000-07:00

At the Amsterdam workshop the initial time horizon was estimated to be two to three years in a multi-phase activity, with Phase 1 being rapid engagement over a six+ month period. Once the RH workgroup started dealing with the use case analysis and selection for implementation, the timeline was scheduled in terms of milestones:

June 2009 - State of development of Repository Handshake works to be summarized at OAI6 (CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication) in Geneva

October 2009 - Production of a 2-page preliminary workplan document for each of the three selected use-case scenarios in relation with actual projects being presently developed. To be presented at the JISC Deposit show and tell barcamp, London, Oct 12th. Upload of resulting information to the wiki http://repinf.pbworks.com/

End of 2009 - Gap analysis and complete study of all selected use cases

2010 - JISC Deposit Call - SONEX potential supporting role

Sonex objectives and development

2010-04-14T00:13:00.000-07:00

The Repository Handshake/SONEX objective was firstly to identify and analyse deposit opportunities (use cases), which map on to different business processes from which there is prospect of prompting and assisting deposit of research papers (and potentially other scholarly work) into the repository space. These include processes within the repository space to alert and assist transfer/access across multiple repositories (in the use case of multiple Institutional Repositories). An incomplete list of other deposit opportunities include: institutionally-assisted deposit (typically from CRIS systems but also research group activity); grant-funded mandated deposit, with requirement for award referencing; deposit from publishers as OA services for authors; assisted deposit as part of desktop authoring applications).

Once a complete use case list was obtained, the work was to be focused on identificating the most interesting deposit opportunities in terms of populating repositories. This analysis should result in proposals for cooperative development and for implementation possibilities.

The following key use case scenarios were identified and associated with projects being already developed (or to be developed) by the institutions taking part in the workgroup. Participation in the use case development and implementation is open as well for other interested institutions:

• Use case nr 1, PI/author for multi-authored, multi-institution journal articles - related to Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) Project at EDINA

• Use-case nr 2, CRIS systems as source of documents for IRs - KE's strand 'Exchanging Research Info'. There are also several ongoing institutional initiatives for CRIS/IR integration, such as those at the University of Glasgow or the Trinity College Dublin

• Use-case nr 3, Publisher as the source of articles - also related to the EDINA-JISC OA-RJ Project, as well as to European PEER Project

• Use-case nr 4, 'Our Bibliography' as source of references for IRs, meaning lists of publications supplied by individual researchers, research groups or departments

• [Potential extra] Use-cases nr 5 (Subject repositories) and 6 (Research evaluation agencies).

See a brief summary of the four main SONEX use cases/deposit opportunities at: http://repinf.pbworks.com/f/poster_SONEX_deposit_opportunities.pdf

No 'Repository Handshake' anymore?

2010-04-13T10:51:00.001-07:00

The Repository Handshake workgroup started its activities along the International Repositories Workshop held in Amsterdam on Mar 16-17, 2009. This workshop was organised by JISC, Surf Foundation and DRIVER in order to (i) identify the essential components of an international repositories infrastructure and (ii) agree ways to resolve any issues identified as such essential components, including areas where practical international collaboration would help. Task analysis was divided up among four workgroups, Repository Handshake being one of the strands. Its objective was to improve the ways in which repositories can be populated with research papers from a range of sources by automating negotiation between depositing agent and repository(ies), building from the SWORD protocol. At the end of the Amsterdam work sessions several relevant use cases had been identified and an action plan was designed for carrying out further analysis on the main ones along a preliminary 6-month phase that would lead to funded projects. The Repository Handshake workgroup would deal with this preliminary phase analysis.

Later on the Repository Handshake strand was renamed Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange (SONEX) by the members of the workgroup, in order to get a more accurate picture of the scope of the works. The new name narrows the scope of the analysis to the actual operations that are being examined, that is, metadata and digital object exchange, leaving out the potentially misleading Handshake terminology.

More information on the other strands developed at the Amsterdam International Workshop in: http://repinf.pbworks.com/

Workgroup members and affiliation

2010-04-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

The Sonex workgroup at DTU Copenhagen, Aug 2009. Left to right:

Pablo de Castro (Chair) – Carlos III University Madrid (UC3M), Spain

Jim Downing – University of Cambridge, UK

Mogens Sandfaer – Danish Technical University (DTU), Denmark

Peter Burnhill – EDINA-University of Edinburgh, UK