Research Support Community Day 11 February 2013 Griffith University

1. Data are the New Black
Susan Robbins
University of Western Sydney
February 2013 Research Support Forum
s.robbins@uws.edu.au

2. ANDS Projects 2012/3
Data Capture
Seeding The Commons
Metadata Stores

3. Research Data/Descriptions (Aust)
Research Data Australia http://researchdata.ands.org.au/
Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/
Google/Search Engines
Institutional repositories http://ro.uow.edu.au/data/

4. Road Blocks to Data Sharing
Stakeholder Engagement (reasons given for not wanting to participate in projects)
• Not yet finished with data (still analysing or publishing from it)
• Not mine to share (belongs to grant team etc)
• Collaborators don‟t want to share
• Don‟t have time
• Just don‟t want to!
• Ethics prohibit it (see below )
Ethics
• Didn‟t ask participants if data could be shared (default on form is not to share)
• People won‟t want to participate if I ask them to share

5. „Moving Forward‟ to BAU
Library as a key stakeholder
• Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure buy-in
at all levels
• Facilitate culture change through education and
communication (address „ownership‟ issues)

6. CSIRO to embrace open access Hare, Julie. The Australian
[Canberra, A.C.T] 11 July 2012: 31.
THE CSIRO is making freely available 200,000 research papers dating back to the 1920s on its new, open-access
repository. It is also creating a portal to contain most of the raw research data used by the organisation since its
inception.
"It's a massive job. We will eventually have 86 years of data in the repository," said Jon Curran, CSIRO's general
manager of communications.
"We are anticipating this is where the world of science is heading.
"The mood is there. And we know the more visible the work the more excitement and energy that is generated." …
The CSIRO said it was negotiating with 200 journal and book publishers to establish copyright.
"Where we can't put the full text up, we are pointing to the publisher's website," Mr Curran said.
Given the size of the operation, it would be a gradual process until all the papers and data were uploaded.
"But we are removing the reasons why staff shouldn't put their work in our open-access repository. People can see this
is changing the way science operates," he said.

7. Geoscience Data Journal
New Wiley open access data journal
“It is becoming increasingly important that the data which underpins key findings should
be made more available to allow for the further analysis and interpretation of those
results,” said Mike Davis, Vice President and Managing Director, Life Sciences Wiley.
“The ability of researchers to create and collect often huge new data sets has been
growing rapidly in parallel with options for their storage and retrieval in a wide range of
data repositories. We are launching the Geoscience Data Journal in response to these
important developments.”
http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-104139.html

8. Wikidata
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
Wikidata aims to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and
edited by humans and machines alike. It will provide data in all the languages of the
Wikimedia projects, and allow for the central access to data in a similar vein as
Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files.
The goal of Wikidata is to create a common data repository.
Project development March 2012 – March 2013

9. Thomson Reuters Unveils Data Citation Index
for Discovering Global Data Sets
First of Its Kind Data Citation Index Connects Researchers to Data Repositories around the World
This new research resource from Thomson Reuters creates a single source of discovery for scientific,
social sciences and arts and humanities information by connecting foundational research within data
repositories around the world to related peer-reviewed literature in journals, books, and conference
proceedings already indexed in the Web of Knowledge.
The Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index, scheduled for release later this year, makes research
within the digital universe discoverable, citable and seamlessly linked to the article detailing the
outputs from the original investigation. Thomson Reuters has partnered with data repositories such
(ANDS, harvesting RDA)
"By linking publications in the Web of Science to the datasets on which they are based and enhancing
the discoverability of data through the Data Citation Index, Thomson Reuters is highlighting the
importance of research data in the scientific process."

10. Questions