We held the last of the Mellon-funded Thought Leader Meeting series Wednesday. The topic of this meeting was on Research Data and explored many of the issues surrounding the use, reuse, preservation, and citation of data in scholarship....
Some work done by the JISC had been focused on mandating deposit of materials for the purpose of preservation. Unfortunately, the project didn’t succeed and was withdrawn in 2007. One of the potential reasons that more than $3 million investment turned out to be a disappointment was possibly its focus on archiving and preservation of the data deposited and not focused on reuse and application of deposited data. In order for the preservation to be deemed worth the investment, simultaneous focus on the reuse of the data is critical to ensuring that the investment sees some form of return — apart from developing a large repository of never-accessed data.
While there was some discussion during the day that related to encouraging use and sharing of research data and methodologies, technical standards will not help with what is inherently a political question. Many of the rewards and recognition in the scholarly process come back to the formalities of publication, which have developed over centuries. As with many standards-related questions, the problems are not normally related to technologies per se, but often hinge on the political or social conventions that support certain activities. That said, the development of citation structures, descriptive metadata conventions, discovery methodologies, and curation strategies will add to the growing trends of utilizing these data forms in scholarly communications. By expanding their use and ensuring that the content if preserved and citable, NISO could help encourage expanded use of data in the communication process.
The report of this meeting will be publicly available in a few weeks on the NISO website....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/06/2008 10:43:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
