Global Community Guidelines for Documenting, Sharing, and Reusing Quality Information of Individual Digital Datasets

Open-source science builds on open and free resources that include data, metadata, software, and workflows. Informed decisions on whether and how to (re)use digital datasets are dependent on an understanding about the quality of the underpinning data and relevant information. However, quality information, being difficult to curate and often context specific, is currently not readily available for sharing within and across disciplines. To help address this challenge and promote the creation and (re)use of freely and openly shared information about the quality of individual datasets, members of several groups around the world have undertaken an effort to develop international community guidelines with practical recommendations for the Earth science community, collaborating with international domain experts. The guidelines were inspired by the guiding principles of being findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Use of the FAIR dataset quality information guidelines is intended to help stakeholders, such as scientific data centers, digital data repositories, and producers, publishers, stewards and managers of data, to: i) capture, describe, and represent quality information of their datasets in a manner that is consistent with the FAIR Guiding Principles; ii) allow for the maximum discovery, trust, sharing, and reuse of their datasets; and iii) enable international access to and integration of dataset quality information. This article describes the processes that developed the guidelines that are aligned with the FAIR principles, presents a generic quality assessment workflow, describes the guidelines for preparing and disseminating dataset quality information, and outlines a path forward to improve their disciplinary diversity.

Report on Integrating Digital Humanities into the Web of Scholarship with SHARE – Association of Research Libraries

“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released today a white paper that reports the findings of a two-year project investigating the value SHARE could have for digital humanities scholars. SHARE is an open-source community that develops tools and services to connect related research outputs for new kinds of scholarly discovery.

This project, partly funded by a grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities, explored how scholars promote discovery of their own digital humanities work, and how they find digital scholarship or its components for their own use….”

Richard Johnson Receives 2016 LITA/Christian Larew Memorial Scholarship | News and Press Center

“Johnson is the Co-Director of Digital Initiatives and Scholarship at Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame. In this role, he directs the design and development of the libraries’ data curation and digital library solutions. He also currently serves as a Visiting Program Officer for the Association of Research Libraries for the SHARE project to develop and deepen SHARE partnerships with other organizations to improve data sharing, metadata alignment, and foster a tighter network of research repositories, databases, and information systems. Johnson has contributed to several other collaborations such as DASPOS (Data and Software Preservation for Open Science), an NSF grant funded project focused on open sharing of scientific data especially within High Energy Physics (HEP), and a burgeoning collaboration between Notre Dame and the Center for Open Science. He spearheaded the implementation of the University of Notre Dame’s institutional repository, CurateND, and he has contributed to the multi-institutional Hydra collaboration as both a code committer and technical manager on several projects….”

How Open Is It? An interview with Greg Tananbaum | PLOScast

“As Open Access becomes more widespread, quantifying the range of OA options has become complex. In this PLOScast, Elizabeth Seiver speaks with Greg Tananbaum, the owner of ScholarNext, about the spectrum of Open Access, the tool available to help academics gauge the openness of an article, OA policies and emerging developments in scholarly communication. Together they discuss how machine readability is playing a role in OA publishing, issues surrounding OA funding, and how Open Access journals can work together. Greg focuses on the intersection of technology, content and academia. He’s been working with SPARC since 2007 on issues relating to Open Access and open data. If you are interested in learning more, please check out the following links …”

Inside Public Access

“Welcome to Inside Public Access, where experts and insiders track the US Public Access program. The US Government has embarked on a massive new public access program to make the scholarly literature that flows from over a hundred billion dollars a year in federally funded research publicly available. How this massive new program will play out, especially who will win and who will lose, remains to be seen. Inside Public Access is here to provide ongoing news and analysis to those with a need to know about the emerging US public access program. Subscribe now at the rate of less than ten dollars a week for a one year subscription to our weekly newsletter. Our inside reporting is led by David Wojick….SUBSCRIPTION RATES: One year = $500, Six months = $300….