Drop-in sessions for Open Access and Research Data Management

As part of the Library strategy to extend our support for open access and research data management we are organising a series of drop-in sessions open to University of St Andrews researchers from all Schools.  During the sessions, members of staff and research students will be able to drop-in at any point and ask any questions relating to funders’ requirements on open access and research data, how to upload manuscripts and data into Pure and general research data management queries.

With the new Open Access policy for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) fully in force very soon and already adopted across the University, we need to ensure all researchers know the essential steps to ensure eligibility for the next REF. We also want to make sure researchers know how to gain all the benefits of Open Access. The increasing requirements to manage data as part of funded projects, and new policies on data sharing in place from funders such as EPSRC, mean we want to ensure our community knows how to get the support they need.

St Andrews researchers are welcome to drop in and ask any questions regarding:
-          Open Access for REF2020
-          Uploading your publications in Pure
-          Funding for ‘Gold’ Open Access
-          Open Access options for specific publishers
-          Funders’ requirements on research data and publications
-          Data Management Plans
-          Uploading your data in Pure
-          Sharing your data
-          Storing your data
-          General data management
-          Any other topic


The Library’s Open Access (OA) and Research Data Management (RDM) drop-in sessions are on:

•    Mon 1 February, 13:00 – 15:00, Buchanan Building Room 103
•    Fri 5 February, 12:00 – 14:00, Hebdomadar’s Room
•    Mon 22 February, 13:00 – 15:00, Buchanan Building Room 103
•    Fri 26 February, 12:00 – 14:00, Hebdomadar’s Room

Please do come and meet members of your OA and RDM support teams!

The Open Science Prize: enabling discoveries for health

The Open Science Prize has been launched by the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to unleash the power of open content and data to advance biomedical research and its application for health benefit.

The Prize encourages technology experts and inventive researchers to submit innovative ideas for services, tools, and platforms that will make it easier for scientists, innovators and the wider public to discover, access and re-use the digital information being generated through health research. The aim of the Open Science Prize is also that of promoting international collaborations for the development of solutions that can benefit the global research community.

The competition consists of two phases and the opportunity to receive a prize of $230,000.

The deadline for entries is 29 February 2016.

For more information visit https://www.openscienceprize.org/.

Federica Fina
(Research Data Management)

Open Data: Wiley to partner with Figshare

In recent years it has become increasingly important for researchers to publish the data underlying research. A search of Sherpa/Juliet (a search engine that compiles funder mandates and policies relating to open access) confirms this, revealing that there are 41 funders that require open access to research data, with a further 18 that encourage it.

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/stats.php?la=en&mode=advanced. © 2015, University of Nottingham .

The academic publisher Wiley has decided to take a proactive step to help authors meet the data requirements of their funders. Wiley is looking to support authors by integrating data sharing into the existing publication workflow. They are doing this by partnering with Figshare; a cloud based repository for academic research outputs, including data.

The new service offered by Wiley is currently being piloted by a number of journals and will be rolled out over the coming months. Wiley are also expected to release data citation and sharing policies during this time.

New open access data repository for autism research

Stanford University has announced a new and ambitious project to establish the world’s largest collaborative open access repository for data on autism. The project is called The Hartwell Research Technology Initiative, or iHART for short. The project goal is to provide the research community with a centralised repository for biomedical data on autism. It is hoped that the increased access to data will enable greater collaboration across research centres and institutions, and will lead to new techniques for intervention and detection.

The iHART project is funded by a $9 million grant from the Hartwell Foundation - a charitable organisation that grants awards for biomedical research to help children. iHART will be led by Dennis Wall, a specialist in autism spectrum disorder and Associate Professor of Paediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The repository will have an integrated portal that will enable researchers to draw on a variety of data types, ‘including phenotypes, proteomics, metabolomics, genomics, measurements and imaging of brain activity, information on the gut microbiome, blood-based biomarkers, physician narratives, diagnostic test results and treatment protocols.’ (Stanford Medicine news centre). Through the portal users will also be able to integrate their own data.

See the press release here: http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/06/9-million-grant-to-establish-open-access-autism-database.html

Open Access and content mining

We've previously blogged about the British Library Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) that stores theses metadata and, where possible, the full text of digitised theses. BL Labs now wants to explore EThOS metadata for content mining or analysis of trends and is currently inviting research questions that could be answered using this approach. The move follows on from its project providing data to Virginia Tech to develop algorithms for automated subject tagging of theses.

This is another example of an overlay project underpinned by large-scale data harvesting such as the successful Mechanical Curator project that released one million out of copyright images into the public domain for researcher use and re-use.

ChemSpider is an earlier project that brings together chemical structures from a variety of sources into a free database including data from St Andrews theses. This publishing platform provides opportunities to make good quality data public, re-use and preserve known compound data and related information to advance research, develop services and surface the data on the wider internet.

It's an exciting area of Open Access and Open data and there are likely to be further developments as efforts are made digitising older theses and other sources.

Image captured by the Mechanical Curator project.  No known copyright restrictions.

Making research data count

Are you a researcher interested in metrics that could track and measure the impact of research data? We invite you to contribute to a short survey which aims to learn what metrics would be useful to you. Responses will feed into a project with the ultimate goal of designing and developing metrics that track and measure data use, creating 'data-level metrics' (DLM).

California Digital Library (CDL), the Public Library of Science (PLOS), and the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) are investigating researcher attitudes towards potential metrics for datasets.

See the Making Data Count project site for more information.

Access the survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/makedatacount

We all know that data are important for research. So how can we quantify that? How can you get credit for the data you produce? What do you want to know about how your data is used? If you are a researcher or data manager, we want to hear from you. Take this 5-10 minute survey and help us craft data-level metrics.

[http://blogs.plos.org/tech/how-do-you-do-data/]