The Best Laid Data Plans

Sometimes researchers have data that simply gets away from them.  The project started small and grew over time and the data that grew along with the project simply became unwieldy.  Often when researchers receive a grant they simply want to get started doing the project.  The data that is collected gets stored in files on someone's computer.  The researcher thinks they will surely remember how things are organized.  Time rolls on and the data gets bigger and bigger.  Looking at the data several years down the road the researcher team realizes that the data wasn't really organized or labelled very well.  This underscores the need to organize and decide on access points at the beginning of a project.

It is known the by far the largest hazard to the sustainability is human error.  I was reminded this week of a project where many of these stories have been documented for the community.  These could all be tagged as #avoidthesepitfalls DataONE has collected these stories that they describe as "cautionary tales from researchers."  You can find these stories - some accompanied by video - at https://www.dataone.org/data-stories  

I think these stories would be very useful as mobilization tools for the librarians and IT personnel charged with helping to solve these issues for researchers, if not for the researchers themselves.

NSF's OSTP response released: "Today's Data, Tomorrow's Discoveries"

The community has been waiting with baited breath to see what NSF would do regarding the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's mandate for public access to results of federally funded research.  The memorandum from OSTP, "Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research", was issued in February 22. 2013 and directs Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. 

The National Science Foundation has now issued a plan: "Today's Data, Tomorrow's Discoveries."   The requirement will apply to new awards resulting from proposals submitted or due, on or after the effective date of the Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide that will be issued in January 2016. 

Section 3.1 provides the following detail:

NSF will require that either the version of record or the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions described in the scope above (Section 2.0) and resulting from new awards resulting from proposals submitted, or due, on or after the January 2016 effective date must: 

•  Be deposited in a public access compliant repository designated by NSF;

•  Be available for download, reading, and analysis free of charge no later than 12 months after initial publication;

•  Possess a minimum set of machine-readable metadata elements in a metadata record to be made available free of charge upon initial publication (Section 7.3.1); 

•  Be managed to ensure long-term preservation (Section 7.7); and 

•  Be reported in annual and final reports during the period of the award with a unique persistent identifier8 that provides links to the full text of the publication as well as other metadata elements. 

UK Libraries has been preparing for this since the OSTP memorandum was released and we are developing services and training to help our University of Kentucky researchers comply with this mandate.  Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks!  

Virtual Conference on Scientific Data Management

Mark your calendars for February 18th to participate in a virtual conference - "Scientific Data Management: Caring for Your Institution and its Intellectual Wealth"  The cost of participation in this professional development opportunity is being covered by UK Libraries.

This NISO virtual conference will explore many current and up-and-coming aspects of research data management, including:

·         Data management practice meets policy

·         Uses for the data management plan

·         Building data management capacity and functionality

·         Citing and curating datasets

·         Connecting datasets with other products of scholarship

·         Changing researchers’ practices

·         Teaching data management techniques

A complete schedule of the sessions may be found at: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2015/virtual_conferences/sci_data_management/

TOPICS AND SPEAKERS

• Keynote Address – Laura J. Biven, Ph.D., Senior Science and Technology Advisor, Office of the Deputy Director for Science Programs, Office of Science, US Department of Energy
• Research Data Curation - Jennifer Doty, Research Data Librarian, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Robert W. Woodruff Library
• Data Management Best Practices – Regina F. Raboin, Science Research and Instruction Librarian/ Data Management Services Group Coordinator, Tisch Library, Tufts University
• DART Project: Data Management Plans as a Research Tool – Amanda L. Whitmire, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Data Management Specialist, Oregon State University Libraries & Press
• Building Data Management Capacity – Heidi Imker, Ph.D., Director of the Research Data Service, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• FORCE11 – Dr. Melissa Haendel, Assistant Professor, Ontology Development Group, OHSU Library, Department of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University
• The RMap Project – Sheila M. Morrissey, Senior Research Developer, Ithaka 
•  The Open Science Framework – Andrew Sallans, Partnerships, Collaborations, and Funding, Center for Open Science
• Roundtable Discussion

The various sessions run from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We have scheduled the Active Learning Classroom  - WTYL 2-34A for the event.