ImpactStory Blogpost 25 Aug 2014:  One month, three exciting new Impactstory features In our last post on the Impactstory blog, we hinted at the cool new set of features we’re rolling out over the next month as part of our Five Meter release.   We wanted to give you the inside scoop on these features before their debut and get your feedback! Easier import to Impactstory, and keeping your profile more up-to-date We know how much of a pain it is to keep your CV up-to-date, so we’re going to make Impactstory that much better at keeping your it current, without the need for you to do much (if anything at all). We’re currently exploring routes to implementation that include: Increasing the speed with which we sample third-party sites like Figshare and ORCID, so there’s less of a lag between when new products are added to those sites and when they appear on Impactstory. (That lag is currently one week, which is awesome for many of our users, but could be improved upon.) Allowing you to email us a link or citation to a new product Allowing you to tweet at us with certain hashtags and links to new products Assuming you have to do anything at all to update your Impactstory profile, how would you prefer to do it? Forwarding manuscript acceptance emails? A bookmarklet a la Mendeley? What’s the easiest and least-hassle way we could do this for you? Upload OA versions of your papers directly to Impactstory This was one of the most wanted features mentioned in recent user interviews. And since we’re aiming to make Impactstory a solid replacement for scientists’ online web presence and CV, it follows that we should debut a feature that will allow researchers to share their work like they would on their website, but with less hassle. What we’re most excited about for this feature debut is the ability to now track pageview and download counts for content that previously couldn’t be easily tracked on scientists’ websites. The feature won’t provide permanent IDs like DOIs for uploaded content, nor will it provide full-scale archival preservation for content for now (like Figshare and many institutional repositories currently do, thanks to partnerships with CLOCKSS, etc). But we (like many of you) believe in the importance of permanent IDs and digital preservation. We’ll be keeping those issues in mind for future improvements and listening to see how much demand there is from users like you. Ability to customize your profile’s appearance You’ll soon be able to prioritize content and choose what people can see on your Impactstory profile, including current profile content and also new types of content that we’re calling widgets (think WordPress widgets). Some widgets we’re aiming to debut include: the ability to feature a paper or product you’re proud of (as well as their metrics), a “bio” section, a research interests section, and integration with your blog. Are there other uses for a customizable UI or types of widgets you’d love to see? We’re also going to reformat profile badges to make ‘em more informative: the reformat will include the actual metrics themselves, percentile information, and possibly other information. The customizable UI feature debut, as a whole, will set the stage for an oft-requested feature: the ability to group products into research packages. Cool, so what’s next? We’re going to start rolling this features out ASAP–the upload feature will likely be the first to happen, and it might happen later this week. We’re aiming to have all of these implemented by September 15. We’d love to get your feedback in the comments over on the blog on the questions we pose here, and welcome your thoughts over on the Feedback Forum on new features to consider implementing in our next sprints.

Privacy in health care - brief ABC interview with A/Prof John Glover. Discusses use of health and spatial data to aid policy development and health service provision, and challenges faced by strict data (non)release policies for MBS data. Discusses privacy issues around health data.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/healthreport/hr-john-glover/5235168

Inflammation Data Clash

Identical datasets yield opposite conclusions on the use of mice as models of human inflammation.

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/40713/title/Inflammation-Data-Clash/

WIKIMEDIA, DOUG BECKERSIn 2013, a large group of collaborators published a paper in PNAS concluding that genomic responses to inflammatory stress in mice don’t correlate well with those in humans. “The prevailing assumption—that molecular results from current mouse models developed to mimic human diseases translate directly to human conditions—is challenged by our study,” Junhee Seok, who’s now at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

Fast forward to last week, and another study, using the very same data, reached the opposite conclusion.

“Here we re-evaluated the same gene expression datasets used in the previous study by focusing on genes whose expression levels were significantly changed in both humans and mice,” Keizo Takao and Tsoyosji Miyakawa wrote in their recent paper, also published in PNAS. “Contrary to the previous findings, the gene expression patterns in the mouse models showed extraordinarily significant correlations with those of the human conditions.”

So what gives?

According to a press release from Fujita Health University, where Miyakawa is based, the original study compared all the genomic changes, regardless of whether the involved genes only responded to the stress in one of the species. Such an approach “obscures the correlation between homologous genes of humans and mice to nearly zero, as demonstrated by Seok et al.” in the 2013 paper, the release read.

Gregory Hickok, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, tweeted: “Reflects that the conclusions aren’t automatically given by data. It’s all in the interpretation.”

A Librarian's Guide to OpenRefine

Academic librarians working in technical roles may rarely see stacks of books, but they doubtless see messy digital data on a daily basis. OpenRefine is an extremely useful tool for dealing with this data without sophisticated scripting skills and with a very low learning curve. Once you learn a few tricks with it, you may never need to force a student worker to copy and paste items onto Excel spreadsheets. 

From the ACRL TechConnect Blog by Margaret Heller http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/?p=3276

A day in the life of a NY Taxi - great visualisation

Follow all the data from a NY taxi for a full 24 hours.
Careful - it is mesmerizing!

http://nyctaxi.herokuapp.com/

"Data Publishing while Preserving Data Privacy" - Harvard presentation

Data Publishing while Preserving Data Privacy - set of slides describing Harvard's repository, but also good workflows integrating data publication with citation and reuse.

http://datascience.iq.harvard.edu/files/datascience/files/iassist-crosas.pdf

Preparing (clinical) data for publication

A clear, instructive paper by BMJ editors on how to prepare health data (including sensitive data) for publication in a repository. Based on their review of confidentialising methods, ethical obligations, and expert experience. A great intro to the issues around publishing sensitive health data.

Paper for download here: http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c181

Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project at Harvard University

"Integrating Approaches to Privacy Across the Research Lifecycle: Long-Term Longitudinal Studies" -  Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project at Harvard University held a workshop titled "Integrating Approaches to Privacy across the Research Data Lifecycle." Over forty leading experts in computer science, statistics, law, policy, and social science research convened to discuss the state of the art in data privacy research. The resulting conversations centered on the emerging tools and approaches from the participants’ various disciplines and how they should be integrated in the context of real-world use cases that involve the management of confidential research data.

Research report: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2469848##

Great (Open Access) article on PLoS one

Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results

• Jelte M. Wicherts mail,
 
• Marjan Bakker,
 
• Dylan Molenaar

• Published: November 02, 2011
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026828

Abstract

Background

The widespread reluctance to share published research data is often hypothesized to be due to the authors' fear that reanalysis may expose errors in their work or may produce conclusions that contradict their own. However, these hypotheses have not previously been studied systematically.

Methods and Findings

We related the reluctance to share research data for reanalysis to 1148 statistically significant results reported in 49 papers published in two major psychology journals. We found the reluctance to share data to be associated with weaker evidence (against the null hypothesis of no effect) and a higher prevalence of apparent errors in the reporting of statistical results. The unwillingness to share data was particularly clear when reporting errors had a bearing on statistical significance.

Conclusions

Our findings on the basis of psychological papers suggest that statistical results are particularly hard to verify when reanalysis is more likely to lead to contrasting conclusions. This highlights the importance of establishing mandatory data archiving policies.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828

US DOE releases Public Access Plan for publications and data

The U.S. Department of Energy has released its Public Access Plan in response to the OSTP Memorandum of February 22, 2013, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research.”  The Plan outlines the Department’s approach to implementing the objectives of the OSTP memorandum of making scholarly publications and datasets resulting from research directly arising from DOE funding more readily accessible to the public.

The Dept has also released it's “Statement on Digital Data Management”. 

Opening Up Scholarly communications: Jisc & CNI conference - slides etc are available

Jisc and CNI conference 2014

Opening up scholarly communications

The 2014 Jisc/CNI conference brought together leading experts from the UK, US and Europe to explore the theme of opening up scholarly communications through the four key themes of:

• policy
• data
• access
• infrastructure

This event took place 10 July 2014

Slides available: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/jisc-and-cni-conference-2014-10-jul-2014

OPEN DATA: Data Notes: Dissecting the most boring buzzword ever

This is a great post by Amye Kenall on BioMed Central and worth reading...

"By far one of the biggest concerns around Open Data is not whether we have the technology to enable researchers to make their data open but whether the cultural incentives are in place to make researchers freely share their data. Several publishers have recently started publishing ‘data journals’ or ‘data notes’. Is this latest publishing buzzword the answer to incentivising Open Data? ...

Check it out: http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/author/amyekenall/

Thanks Anna Shadbolt (Uni Melb) for sharing this on ands-partners

The UK Medical Heritage Library: uniting digitised collections

The Wellcome Library and Jisc are delighted to announce our nine UK research library partners to the UK Medical Heritage Library project. These libraries will be making their historic collections available for digitisation alongside the Wellcome Library’s own 19th century works. They make up the bulk of the 15 million page goal made possible by funding from the Higher Education and Funding Council for England and Jisc.

The nine partners include:

6 university libraries:

       UCL (University College London)
       University of Leeds
       University of Glasgow
       London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
       King’s College London
       University of Bristol

3 Royal College libraries:
       Royal College of Physicians of London
       Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
       Royal College of Surgeons of England

Relevant works will be selected by the partner libraries from their historic book and pamphlet collections, representing a broad selection of works from across medicine, health, and related subjects. The Internet Archive will carry out all the digitisation work in a brand new scanning centre here at the Wellcome Library that will accommodate well over 2,000 items per month at peak times.

From October, these will start to become available online as part of the Medical Heritage Library  collection on the Internet Archive website and via the Wellcome Library catalogue.

More details on the project and the library partners can be found here:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2014/WTP056966.htm