The JISC Managing Research Data Programme funded PREPARDE project invites anyone with an interest to sign up to the new Research DATA-PUBLICATION announce and discuss  mailing list.

This list will be used to make announcements and promote discussion to Higher Education and the international research community about research data publication. Topics include technical and scientific peer review, trusted repository accreditation and the challenges for researchers, institutions, funders and publishers.

Creation of this list is a recommended outcome from the recent PREPARDE project workshop which included representatives from many key stakeholders from research, funders, institutions and publishers, and was held in January 2013 at the International Digital Curation Conference in Amsterdam. There will be a write up of this event soon.

And it’s a good idea we hope…!

Thanks, Jonathan Tedds

(Pulling together some useful links on the subject of data repository accreditation so that they're all in the one place)

•  On trust and risk and, more importantly: Can we measure any of it? – #iPRES2012 (3) - blog post about an iPRES2012 session about trustworthy digital repositories.

•  TrustedDigitalRepository.eu - information about the European Framework for Audit and Certification of Digital Repositories. "The framework will consist of a sequence of three levels, in increasing trustworthiness:
  • Basic Certification is granted to repositories which obtain DSA (Data Seal of Approval) certification;
  • Extended Certification is granted to Basic Certification repositories which in addition perform a structured, externally reviewed and publicly available self-audit based on ISO 16363 or DIN 31644;
  • Formal Certification is granted to repositories which in addition to Basic Certification obtain full external audit and certification based on ISO 16363 or equivalent DIN 31644."

•  APARSEN deliverables - including a link to D33.1A Report on Peer Review of Digital Repositories

•  Trustworthy Repositories - overview of Trusted Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC). "In general terms, TRAC:
  • Provides tools for the audit, assessment, and potential certification of digital repositories
  • Establishes documentation requirements required for audit
  • Delineates a process for certification
  • Establishes appropriate methodologies for determining the soundness and sustainability of digital repositories"

•  Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria and Checklist - version 1.0, February 2007

•  Data Seal of Approval - "The Data Seal of Approval ensures that in the future, research data can still be processed in a high-quality and reliable manner, without this entailing new thresholds, regulations or high costs." - first level in the Trusted Digital Repositories Framework

•  Primary Trustworthy Digital Repository Authorisation Body (ISO-PTAB) - provides ISO audit and certification of digital repositories and plays a major role in training and accrediting auditors. The audits are performed using the standard ISO16363:2011.

•  ISO16363:2011 - the standard itself - Magenta book, September 2011.

•  Repository selection process for Thompson-Reuters Data Citation Index - discussing topics such as
  • Persistence and stability
  • Funding statements
  • Peer review
  • Age of material
  • Links to the research literature

The  OpenAIRE Interoperability Workshop was held at the University of Minho, Portugal, on the 7/8 February 2013. I was there, wearing a number of different hats. Firstly, as a member of the OpenAIREplus team, secondly, presenting about PREPARDE and our work on workflows and cross-linking, and thirdly as a data scientist and repository manager.

My presentation was videoed and can be seen on the  OpenAIRE Vimeo channel. I've attached my slides to this blog post too.

I made it to the workshop on the first day (after a few hiccups with broken planes) just in time for the session on Open Science, Open Data and Repositories, which was part of the University of Minho's Open Access Seminar. This was a really good session for introducing people to key concepts about open data and open access, and even gave us a bit of a history lesson too about how this whole scientific publishing thing got started. (I never knew quite how pivotal  Henry Oldenburg was - not only was he the founding editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, but he also pretty much invented the process of pre-publication peer-review.)

The session on OpenAIREplus was also really useful for getting a feel about what OpenAIRE are trying to do to extend their services to include research data, especially in the case where it's linked directly to publications*. Discussions about this were continued on the following day in a splinter group talking about the proposed OpenAIRE guidelines for Data Archive Managers.

I'm very glad to see that these guidelines are based around the  DataCite metadata schema, tying in nicely with the work we're doing at BADC and the general direction data citation seems to be going at the moment. The plan is to dig out some case studies of data sets linked to published papers, and I have a couple in mind already, one of which relates to my (very soon to be published) GDJ paper.

OpenAIRE and PREPARDE have a lot of shared interests, so it was very nice to be able to connect with them at this event, and even start talking about what should come next by way of data publication and article-data linking in the future. The calls for Horizon 2020 will be out soon...

*I'm a bit wary of this, as it's almost putting data as second class citizens in comparison to articles, but I do appreciate they have to limit the scope of the project somehow in order to get stuff done.

Not strictly a PREPARDE event (although our funder, JISC is one of the partners) but extremely relevant to the bigger picture, I attended the Supporting Infrastructure Models for Research Data Management ( SIM4RDM) Project workshop on the 31st Jan in Dublin. SIM4RDM is putting a framework of evaluation and policy recommendations together to inform key EU research and innovation funding programme  Horizon 2020’s decision-making processes.

Crucially, SIM4RDM is aiming for national and global coverage as well as EU-level initiatives, and research data funding, management, curation, re-use, accreditation (the usual suspects) are all key parts of the picture. There was an interesting EC presentation by Carlos Morais Pires on how it relates to the overall plans for a research data management framework, updates on the project’s progress and methodology to date from key members, as well as a sneak preview on the  Research Data Alliance by RDA Council Member (and leader of the group that produced  Riding the Wave) John Wood. All in all, a tiring but worthwhile day.

A couple of take-homes:

Collaborations. The SIM4RDM Landscape Report, available on the website, indicates that ‘mixed’ groups such as we have on the JISC funded PREPARDE project - with publishers, researchers, data centre managers, etc all working towards a common goal - are very much the exception rather than the norm. That’s something that would ideally change.

Related point) Engagement. OK, so we can fill a room with engaged enthusiasts, but there is still a sense of it being largely the same crowd in different rooms. We need to find some potential new converts to preach to.

The workflows and missions espoused by PREPARDE need to become the norm, and I’d very much like to think we can put something in place to support that.