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As part of International Digital Preservation Day (Thursday 30 November), the Digital Preservation Team of the University Library held a series of 6 roadshows with a pop-up exhibition to raise awareness of digital preservation. The team wanted to highlight for students, staff and researchers the existence of a team dedicated to digital preservation within the University. The team also sough to find out what people were concerned about in terms of the long term continuity of the digital content that they create and use.
Digital Preservation Day
On International Digital Preservation Day itself, the team hosted a keynote talk from Prof. Natasa Milic-Frayling, Professor in Data Science at Nottingham University and Chair of the UNESCO PERSIST digital cultural heritage programme. Prof. MIlic-Frayling argued that we need to think more in terms of ‘digital continuity’ and the technology providers need to think more about providing access to their past technology so they don’t build in obsolescence.
The talk was followed by a panel discussion on retention of digital materials. There were contributions from Huw Jones (Cambridge Digital Library), Dr. Katrina Dean (Keeper and Modern Manuscripts and Archives), Dr. Arthur Smith (Deputy Head, Office of Scholarly Communication) and Dr. Anne Alexander (Digital Humanities Network). The panel agreed that we need to address how we raise awareness throughout the University.
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In summer 2017, TU Delft launched the Data Stewardship project. Now, the team at TU Delft have published a report on the first 3 months of the project.
The Stewards have been embedded at faculties, with a Coordinator appointed at the Library. All parties intend to foster collaboration and good practice between the Data Stewards, Coordinators and Faculty Secretaries. To write this report, the team interviewed three researchers as well as using an ongoing quantitative survey.
You can find out more about the project, what the Data Stewards actually do and what are the main challenges for the project are in the report on the Open Working blog.
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On Wednesday 15 November around 100 delegates converged on St Catharine’s College to attend the Engaging Researchers in Good Data Management event. Organised by the Office of Scholarly Communication in partnership with Jisc and SPARC Europe, this conference focused on different responses as to how to engage researchers with the important, but not always exciting, topic of managing data well.
Attendees and speakers came from across Europe and included non-University organisations, which meant a huge breadth of approaches were showcased and issues debated through 18 talks, a panel discussion and 5 focus group discussions. Not only was the event well attend in person; it also had a live streaming audience of 51!
Recordings of all the talks are available under the title '#EngageRDM' (also the hashtag used for those livetweeting on the day) via the University Library YouTube channel.
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Following a court order from the Eastern District Court of Virginia, which fined Sci-Hub $4.8 million on behalf of the American Chemical Society for copyright infringement. However, the court order also required search engines to stop showing Sci-Hub results, including an instruction to place its domains on registryHold/serverHold "to render their names/sites non-resolving".
Possibly due to this ruling, several domains have now been made inactive. Alexandra Elbakyan, the owner of Sci-Hub, intends to continue operating Sci-Hub. However, could rulings like this herald the end of Sci-Hub’s operation?
Find out more on The Register.
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The Engaging Researchers in Good Data Management event hosted at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge on Wednesday 15 November prompted many interesting responses, including a blog post on Nicole Janz’s Political Science Replication blog discussing a question that arose on the day. That question was ‘how has being a Data Champion helped your own academic career?’
A common concern for researchers in a position to advocate for reproducibility is that this would simply be a distraction from their own research. Writing on this blog, the author lists a number of ways in which promoting reproducibility has helped their career, including grant success and finding collaboration partners.
Find out more on the Political Science Replication blog post.
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José Luis Ortega, writing on the LSE Impact blog, examined the presence of academic journals on Twitter. There is plenty of evidence to show that researchers who have their own Twitter handles are tweeting more and thereby more likely to have a higher future citation impact.
Ortega conducted research investigating whether this holds true for journals with individual Twitter accounts. Findings indicated that Twitter accounts devoted to dissemination of articles do increase audience engagement and increase dissemination. However, journals should be careful to not consider this increased dissemination as a scholarly impact factor.
Find out more about the results of this research on the LSE Impact blog post.
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On the Discrete Analysis website, Timothy Gowers writes a progress report one year on from the initial announcement. There are a number of interesting statistics, although due to not being listed on Web of Science the journal does not yet have an impact factor. However, the journal will soon begin the process of applying for an impact factor.
There has also been one change of policy. László Babai, founder of the online journal Theory of Computing provided an adaptation of this journal's style file, allowing Discrete Analysis articles to have a uniform appearance and to display metadata.
Read the report on the Discrete Analysis website.
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SPARC has created an open source list of institutions that have cancelled big deals. Large publishers have been pushing big deals (bundles of journals at a discount price) for more than two decades.
There have been a number of assumed benefits to these big deals, but many drawbacks have come to light over the years, such as price increases (with no mind paid to library budgets). As a result, many libraries and institutions have been looking more closely at their budgets and the value for money of their big deals, with numbers of cancellations increasing. SPARC’s list includes information such as the institution, strategic considerations, outcome and savings.
Find out more on the SPARC website.
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Writing on the Unlocking Research blog, Dr Danny Kingsley discusses the second meeting of the Scholarly Communication Professional Development Group, which followed on from the initial meeting exploring current standards of scholarly communication professional development. A write up of this meeting was also provided by Dr Kingsley on a previous Unlocking Research blog post.
In the second meeting of this Group, a plan was agreed with four main areas of interest. These areas include addressing the need for including scholarly communication training in academic library degree courses and creating a self-assessment tool for individuals trying to decide if scholarly communication is for them.
Find out more in the Unlocking Research blog post.
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Tuesday 12 December, Online
Robin Rice and John Southall, authors of The Data Librarian’s Handbook, will speak about how librarians can support data literacy for their users and for themselves.
Robin will kick off the webinar with an overview of topics in data literacy-related support and training: promoting data citation and open licenses, data discovery and access methods, data formats and standards, data handling and statistical literacy. John will then discuss recent work on improving data literacy for library support staff at the University of Oxford. This includes general sessions on the principles of research data management for library staff, and organising a series of termly data briefings.
Find out more on the LIBER Europe webpage.
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Tuesday 12 December, Online
The UK Data Service would like to invite ESRC funded researchers (and future researchers!) to sign up for an online webinar, where the presenter, Anca Vlad, will ‘walk’ attendees through the process of submitting a data collection into the ReShare repository. Vlad will then answer any questions attendees may have about ReShare and depositing data with them.
Find out more and register online via the UK Data Service website.
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Online
The Educopia Institute have announced the release of the ETD+ Virtual Workshop Series, the final output of the ETD+ project (2014-17). This project was a partnership between the Educopia Institute, NDLTD, ProQuest, bepress, and twelve University libraries, generously supported by IMLS.
Focusing specifically on the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) as a mile-marker in a student’s research trajectory, the ETD+ Virtual Workshop Series provides in-time advice to students and faculty about avoiding common digital loss scenarios for the ETD and all of its affiliated files.
Find out more and access all of the materials via the Educopia website.
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Edge Hill University is seeking a candidate with a PhD in the broad area of Computer Science with a focus in Text Mining/Big Data/Databases for the position of postdoctoral researcher in text mining, Big Data and databases.
The postdoctoral researcher will work on a 3-year H2020 project focusing on evolving scalable architectures for persistence, analytics and monitoring of large volumes of hybrid data. The objective is to design and develop innovative text mining and big data processing methods to be integrated in data persistence architectures.
Find out more and apply by Friday 5 January via the Edge Hill University website.
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The Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, are seeking a dynamic academic as a Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in Statistics and Data Science. The appointee will undertake undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in statistics and data science, including in the applied statistics programmes.
They will promote learning among students with a wide range of mathematical backgrounds. They will undertake supervision of postgraduate research students, seek external research funding, and maintain a research programme of international standard.
Find out more and apply by Wednesday 31 January via the Victoria University of Wellington website.
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The second round has been announced of the Data Science Fellowship Program at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), located in Santa Barbara, California. NCEAS, a global leader in ecological research, is seeking recent graduates from masters and doctoral programs to join the Data Team as paid Fellows. The next six-month session starts in early July 2018. Data Science Fellows will be in residence at NCEAS and will work closely with data and informatics teams to solve data management, curation, analysis, and software issues relating to the State of Alaska's Salmon and People (SASAP) project.
Further details on how to apply before Thursday 1 February can be found on the NCEAS website.
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The Wellcome Trust is inviting applications for research enrichment funding. This funding enables current Wellcome grant holders to increase the impact of their work in regards to public engagement, open research and diversity and inclusion. Three types of funding are available:
- Public engagement – support for engaging the public with the applicant’s research, worth up to £250,000 or five per cent of the main Wellcome grant;
- Open research – support for developing innovative ways to make the applicant’s research open, accessible and reusable, worth up to £50,000;
- Diversity and inclusion – support for identifying and tackling barriers to diversity and inclusion in the applicant’s work, worth up to £20,000.
Find out more and apply by Monday 5 February via the Wellcome Trust website.
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