The Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI): First Year Momentum Leads to Exciting Future Plans | Data Science at NIH

“During the first year of the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), the effort has made noteworthy progress in fostering collaboration across the NIH generalist repository landscape. The GREI team has delivered on not only technical capabilities but on community outreach and engagement with a training webinar series, a community workshop, and conference presentations.

The GREI program brings together seven generalist repository awardees (Dataverse(link is external), Dryad(link is external), Figshare(link is external), Mendeley Data(link is external), Open Science Framework(link is external), Vivli(link is external), and Zenodo(link is external)) to work together in a “coopetition” (competition and cooperation) model of collaboration to reduce the barriers to NIH data sharing, discovery, and reuse. The coopetition effort has organized into functional working groups focused on use cases, metadata and search, metrics, and community engagement with the goals of enhancing interoperability across generalist repositories(link is external) and supporting the data needs of research communities….”

WEBINAR: DIAMAS with CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA – DIAMAS

“The three projects work towards an equitable future for scholarly communication, with academic communities at the centre. The webinar will present this vision and introduce each project’s area of focus. The discussion will demonstrate the projects’ common goal for open and equitable scholarly publishing.

While DIAMAS focuses on developing common standards, guidelines and practices for the Diamond publishing sector, CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA have different aims. The former looks at the IT systems behind journal platforms to help them upscale, professionalise, and reach stronger interoperability. The latter, PALOMERA, is developing actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for Open Access books.

In the session, DIAMAS will be placed in a broader context, displaying how we collaborate with other actors in the Open Access space and plan for long-term impact in the advancement of community-led publishing.

Participants will have the chance to engage with the three projects and their vision for community-driven open scholarly publishing.”

English – Knowledge Equity Network

“For Higher Education Institutions

Publish a Knowledge Equity Statement for your institution by 2025, incorporating tangible commitments aligned with the principles and objectives below.
Commit to institutional action(s) to support a sustained increase of published educational material being open and freely accessible for all to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research.
Commit to institutional action(s) to support a sustained increase of new research outputs being transparent, open and freely accessible for all, and which meet the expectations of funders.
Use openness as an explicit criteria in reaching hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Reward and recognise open practices across both research and research-led education. This should include the importance of interdisciplinary and/or collaborative activities, and the contribution of all individuals to activities.
Define Equity, Diversity and Inclusion targets that will contribute towards open and inclusive Higher Education practices, and report annually on progress against these targets.
To create new mechanisms in and between Higher Education Institutions that allow for further widening participation and increased diversity of staff and student populations.
Review the support infrastructure for open Higher Education, and invest in the human, technical, and digital infrastructure that is needed to make open Higher Education a success.
Promote the use of open interoperability principles for any research or education software/system that you procure or develop, explicitly highlighting the option of making all or parts of content open for public consumption.
Ensure that all research data conforms to the FAIR Data Principles: ‘findable’, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable.

For Funding Agencies

Publish a statement that open dissemination of research findings is a critical component in evaluating the productivity and integrity of research.
Incorporate open research practices into assessment of funding proposals.
Incentivise the adoption of Open Research through policies, frameworks and mandates that require open access for publications, data, and other outputs, with as liberal a licence as possible for maximum reuse.
Actively manage funding schemes to support open infrastructures and open dissemination of research findings, educational resources, and underpinning data.
Explicitly define reward and recognition mechanisms for globally co-produced and co-delivered open educational resources that benefit society….”

 

We need a plan D | Nature Methods

“Ensuring data are archived and open thus seems a no-brainer. Several funders and journals now require authors to make their data public, and a recent White House mandate that data from federally funded research must be made available immediately on publication is a welcome stimulus. Various data repositories exist to support these requirements, and journals and preprint servers also provide storage options. Consequently, publications now often include various accession numbers, stand-alone data citations and/or supplementary files.

But as the director of the National Library of Medicine, Patti Brennan, once noted, “data are like pictures of children: the people who created them think they’re beautiful, but they’re not always useful”. So, although the above trends are to be applauded, we should think carefully about that word ‘useful’ and ask what exactly we mean by ‘the data’, how and where they should be archived, and whether some data should be kept at all….

Researchers, institutions and funders should collaborate to develop an overarching strategy for data preservation — a plan D. There will doubtless be calls for a ‘PubMed Central for data’. But what we really need is a federated system of repositories with functionality tailored to the information that they archive. This will require domain experts to agree standards for different types of data from different fields: what should be archived and when, which format, where, and for how long. We can learn from the genomics, structural biology and astronomy communities, and funding agencies should cooperate to define subdisciplines and establish surveys of them to ensure comprehensive coverage of the data landscape, from astronomy to zoology….”

Guest Post – Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research – And More than Ever – The Scholarly Kitchen

“We all know that the pressures on researchers’ time are increasing; requirements that can enable open research (e.g., depositing research data in open repositories; publishing research open access) can run the risk of adding to those time pressures despite best intentions. Funders, research institutions, and publishers are increasingly bringing in their own specific policies around open research, but we have a duty to make the ability to comply with those policies as easy and simple as possible. Furthermore, without proper incentives and support for researchers to understand why those polices are there, and then how to adhere to them, any extra burden is seen simply as a detractor from the time that could be spent doing research in the first place. One way to improve this is to facilitate better connectivity across the research ecosystem: between researchers, their institutions, their funders, and with the myriad of research inputs and outputs. This is why unique and persistent digital identifiers (PIDs) and associated research descriptors and metadata, are so fundamental to making open research effective….

Open research is not a threat to the scholarly publishing industry, it is the opportunity to refine, evolve, and reinvent what we do so well in order to validate, curate, and deliver research in the best possible way to help maximize its impact, which is what our industry is about….”

Enabling Value featuring The Lens: Showcasing ORCID-enabled scholarly service providers –

“Introducing Enabling Value, a webinar series showcasing how ORCID-enabled scholarly service providers enable fast and simple registry interoperability for ORCID member organizations and other scholarly institutions.

This first session features The Lens and will focus on the new Lens Profiles, a tool built to support researchers to enhance and maintain their ORCID records….”

Interoperable infrastructure for software and data publishing

“Research data and software rely heavily on the technical and social infrastructure to disseminate, cultivate, and coordinate projects, priorities, and activities. The groups that have stepped forward to support these activities are often segmented by aspects of their identity – facets like discipline, for-profit versus academic orientation, and others. Siloes across the data and software publishing communities are even more splintered into those that are driven by altruism and collective advancement versus those motivated by ego and personal/project success. Roadblocks to progress are not limited to commercial interests, but rather defined by those who refuse to build on past achievements, the collective good, and opportunities for collaboration, insisting on reinventing the wheel and reinforcing siloes.

In the open infrastructure space, several community-led repositories have joined forces to collaborate on single integrations or grant projects (e.g. integrations with Frictionless Data, compliance with Make Data Count best practices, and common approaches to API development). While it is important to openly collaborate to fight against siloed tendencies, many of our systems are still not as interoperable as they could and should be. As a result, our aspirational goals for the community and open science are not being met with the pacing that modern research requires….”

A global approach for natural history museum collections | Science

Abstract:  Over the past three centuries, people have collected objects and specimens and placed them in natural history museums throughout the world. Taken as a whole, this global collection is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it, an unparalleled source of information that is directly relevant to issues as diverse as wildlife conservation, climate change, pandemic preparedness, food security, invasive species, rare minerals, and the bioeconomy (1). Strategic coordination and use of the global collection has the potential to focus future collecting and guide decisions that are relevant to the future of humanity and biodiversity. To begin to map the aggregate holdings of the global collection, we describe here a simple and fast method to assess the contents of any natural history museum, and report results based on our assessment of 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums and herbaria from 28 countries.

From the body of the article:

“Natural history museums have generally operated independently, and no interoperable data structure exists to provide open access to their collective holdings. Because most natural history museum data are not digitally discoverable, the networks of data aggregators have not been able to access these “dark data” …”

 

WorldFAIR project

“In the WorldFAIR project, CODATA ( the Committee on Data of the International Science Council) and RDA (the Research Data Alliance), work with a set of 11 disciplinary and cross-disciplinary case studies to advance implementation of the FAIR principles and, in particular, to improve interoperability and reusability of digital research objects, including data. Particular attention is paid to the articulation of an interoperability framework for each case study and research domain.”

WorldFAIR Project (D13.1) Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms | Zenodo

Abstract:  Deliverable 13.1 for the WorldFAIR Project’s Cultural Heritage Work Package (WP13) outlines current practices guiding online digital image sharing by institutions charged with providing care and access to cultural memory, in order to identify how these practices may be adapted to promote and support the FAIR Principles for data sharing.

The report has been compiled by the Digital Repository of Ireland as a key information resource for developing the recommendations forthcoming in Deliverable 13.2. The DRI is Ireland’s national repository for the arts, humanities and social sciences. A Working Group of cultural heritage professionals has been invited to contribute feedback.

There are well-established standards and traditions driving the various approaches to image sharing in the sector, both local and global, which influence everything from the creation of digital image files, their intellectual organisation and level of description, to statements of rights governing use. Additionally, there are technological supports and infrastructures that have emerged to facilitate these practices which have significant investment and robust community support. These practices and technologies serve the existing communities of users well, primarily the needs of government, business and higher education, as well as the broader general public. Recommendations for adapting established collections delivery mechanisms to facilitate the use of cultural heritage images as research data would ideally not supersede or duplicate processes that also serve these other communities of users, and any solutions proposed in the context of the WorldFAIR Project must be made in respect of these wider contexts for image sharing.

New from WorldFAIR! Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: ‘Practices and policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms’ – out now – CODATA, The Committee on Data for Science and Technology

“New WorldFAIR Project Deliverable 13.1 ‘Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and Policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms’ outlines current practices guiding online digital image sharing by institutions charged with providing care and access to cultural memory, in order to identify how these practices may be adapted to promote and support the FAIR principles for data sharing.

This report looks closely at the policies and best practices endorsed by a range of professional bodies and institutions representative of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (the ‘GLAMs’) which facilitate the acquisition and delivery, discovery, description, digitisation standards and preservation of digital image collections. The second half of the report further highlights the technical mechanisms for aggregating and exchanging images that have already produced a high degree of image interoperability in the sector with a survey of six national and international image sharing platforms: DigitalNZ, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Europeana, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive and Flickr….”

Core Router Update | The OA Switchboard I

“On the first working day of 2023, we shared our plans for the coming year. Building on the successes and lessons learned from 2022, we reconfirmed that our overarching focus will continue to be on:  authoritative data from source; interoperability of existing systems; and, connecting the dots of existing PIDs.

?

With this in mind, our first development iteration of 2023 involves a core router update, which is built on feedback from our participants.

Research institutions asked us to further develop the existing ‘auto-cc’ feature, that delivers alerts and metadata on publications from non-corresponding authors via a P1-PIO message (Public Information Only). What is now added, with today’s release, is the feature to also deliver these alerts and metadata in case of non-primary affiliations. This means that if an author has more than one affiliation in the version of record, and the institution is not the first affiliation listed, they now also receive a copy of the P1-PIO message….”

PLOS Adopts CCC Ringgold Identify Database as its PID Solution – The Official PLOS Blog

“CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, today announced The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has adopted the industry-leading Ringgold Identify Database as its Persistent Identifier (PID) solution to streamline organizational data, helping power its Open Access (OA) publishing process with reliability and inclusivity.

A critical aspect leading to the decision was the precision with which PLOS could match accepted papers to institutional funding under its Community Action Publishing (CAP) program….

With over 600,000 Ringgold PIDs and metadata records, Ringgold Identify Database provides a curated view of organization data to help stakeholders improve data quality, drive strategic decision-making, and support data interoperability across the scholarly communications ecosystem. Used by intermediaries, funders, and a growing list of leading publishers, Ringgold Identify Database is the only solution to offer structured organizational hierarchies and consortia connections to help stakeholders quickly understand complex relationships. The database also includes rich metadata and additional identifiers, including the ISNI ID, an ISO Standard open ID to support wider interoperability….”

PLOS Adopts CCC Ringgold Identify Database as its PID Solution – The Official PLOS Blog

“CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, today announced The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has adopted the industry-leading Ringgold Identify Database as its Persistent Identifier (PID) solution to streamline organizational data, helping power its Open Access (OA) publishing process with reliability and inclusivity.

A critical aspect leading to the decision was the precision with which PLOS could match accepted papers to institutional funding under its Community Action Publishing (CAP) program….

With over 600,000 Ringgold PIDs and metadata records, Ringgold Identify Database provides a curated view of organization data to help stakeholders improve data quality, drive strategic decision-making, and support data interoperability across the scholarly communications ecosystem. Used by intermediaries, funders, and a growing list of leading publishers, Ringgold Identify Database is the only solution to offer structured organizational hierarchies and consortia connections to help stakeholders quickly understand complex relationships. The database also includes rich metadata and additional identifiers, including the ISNI ID, an ISO Standard open ID to support wider interoperability….”