1. The Now and Future of Data Publication 2013
#nfdp13 - http://nfdp13.jiscinvolve.org/wp/
Simon Hodson - Jisc
2. Housekeeping, Practicalities
No fire drill scheduled – if fire alarm sounds, it is real!
Exits clearly signed
We are at capacity, please use all available seats!
Breaks, lunch and reception in Ruth Deech Building
Parallel sessions 2 and 4 in the Tzuzuki Lecture Theatre, in the Ruth Deech
Building
3. Webex
1. The presentation is being recorded
2. The remote participants are muted so that background noise and conversation
does not interrupt the presentations.
3. Remote participants are welcome to submit questions on the chat window at any
time. These will be addressed during the question and answer sessions.
4. We will post the URL for panel 2 of the parallel panel session before the panels
begin at 14:00. Participants who wish to attend panel1 should remain connected
to the mainWebexmeeting and participants who wish to attend panel 2 should
join theWebexmeeting at alternate URL.
4. Royal Society
Science as an Open Enterprise Report, 2012
‘how the conduct and communication of
science needs to adapt to this new era
of information technology’.
‘As a first step towards this intelligent
openness, data that underpin a
journal article should be made
concurrently available in an
accessible database. We are now on
the brink of an achievable aim: for all
science literature to be online, for all of
the data to be online and for the two to
be interoperable.’
Royal Society June 2012, Science as an
Open
Enterprise, http://royalsociety.org/policy/
projects/science-public-
enterprise/report/
5. Data and Research Practice
‘publishing an article without at
the same time making the
data/evidence available is
scientific malpractice’
[Geoffrey Boulton at KE
Workshop, ‘Making Data Count’
http://www.knowledge-
exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=
576]
‘Publishing research without
data is advertising, not
science’
[Twitter, #solo12data]
6. Reasons for research data availability?
We want research data to be available for many good reasons…
– Verification of research findings / Deterrence of fraud
– Reproducibility of research / Science as a self-correcting process
– Benefits of data reuse: asking new questions of old data: return on investment
– Metastudies/systematic review: greater statistical value of integrated results.
– Integration of data in interdisciplinary research: the grand challenges require
multiple data sets
– Analysis over vast quantities of data, at ‘webscale’
7. Visions of Future Research Practice
http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm/
Lincoln Orbital Project: Joining up Institutional Systems:
http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2012/12/06/orbital
-deposit-of-dataset-records-to-the-lincoln-
repository-workflow/
10. Promising Signs…
575 data repositories listed on
DataBibhttp://databib.org/
Data repository initiatives; data sharing
protocols, agreements, standards.
Data papers and data journals being
launched.
JorD project
http://jordproject.wordpress.com/ reports
that nearly 50% of journals sampled
have a data availability policy of some
sort (though only 25% of these can be
characterised as ‘strong’).
11. Why are new data publishing initiatives emerging and what are the benefits?
How may we ensure that current initiatives are sustainable, and what policy and funding measures are
necessary?
If data publishing is to promote good research, what metrics and rewards should be in place?
How do we ensure quality and trust in data publishing?
How do we achieve the benefits of making data available at scale for machine processing (might the
analogy with publishing hamper this objective)?
What are the challenges facing data publication? Are the right partners involved?
What is the optimal future of data publication?
Why are we discussing data publishing?Recent calls for greater data availability.SAOEreport looked at the changing conduct of science.Key recommendations are the research data, the data underpinning research findings should be as openly available as possible.Royal Society Report: concurrent publication.
Boulton: publishing an article without at the same time making the data/evidence available is scientific malpractice.
Vision of future of research practice?We want to get to a place where anyone embarking on a research project thinks as a matter of course that it is her responsibility to make the outputs of research publicly available to be tested by colleagues in the field, to inform them and to advance research. And this includes, not just the written summaries of findings but also the data (and the code) which underpin the findings and were necessary to achieve them.
So what is stopping us? Barriers?Relative lack of a fully sustainable data infrastructure.Insufficiently mature knowledge of which data should be retained for reuse.The practical challenge of implementing appropriate annotation/metadata to allow scalable reuse.Research culture where making data available is not rewarded to a sufficient extent to make it attractive.Research culture where data are regarded as a personal asset.
Why data publishing?There is a view that many of these barriers can be broken down by integrating the process of making data available with that of publishing. This might range from the simple act of citing data in the way other sources/references are cited, through data papers to more ambitious data publications where visualisation, fine grained annotation makes the data an integral part of the research communication. Above all, it aims to render the act of making data available a familiar part of research activity and offers the prospect of proper reward, credit and recognition.
Almost enough preambleBefore I pass over to Fiona to introduce our first key note...Thanks to the people and organizations that have made this possibleOnline feedback – please respond to this.