New tools for PLOS Authors to support reproducibility and recognition

http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2017/04/protocols-io-tools-for-reproducibility/

PLOS now partners directly with protocols.io to provide authors better ways to share methodological details about their work, practical tools to reduce wasted research efforts and persistent, citable identifiers for laboratory methods. For PLOS, this is a step forward on commitments to address reproducibility and provide improved recognition and credit for all contributions to a work.

This new offering complements PLOS’ already robust data availability policy, requiring that data underlying the conclusions of an article be made available at the time of publication. Since the strengthening of this policy in 2014, about 60,000 articles have been published that contain a Data Availability Statement.

 

Toolkit of Best Practice for Research Data Management

The LEARN Project has just released its free Toolkit of Best Practice for Research Data Management:

http://learn-rdm.eu/en/research-data-management-toolkit-now-available/

The Toolkit expands on the issues outlined in the LERU Roadmap for Research Data (2013). It is nearly 200 pages long, and includes:

• 23 Best-Practice Case Studies from institutions around the world, drawn from issues in the original LERU Roadmap;
• 8 Main Sections, on topics such as Policy and Leadership, Open Data, Advocacy and Costs;
• One Model RDM Policy, produced by the University of Vienna and accompanied by guidance and an overview of 20 RDM policies across Europe;
• An Executive Briefing in six languages, aimed at senior institutional decision makers.

LEARN's Final Conference will take place in London on 5 May:

http://learn-rdm.eu/en/events/final-conference/

How do researchers pay for data publishing?

Results of a recent submitter survey by Dyrad:

https://blog.datadryad.org/2017/04/18/how-do-researchers-pay-for-data-publishing-results-of-a-recent-submitter-survey/

Key takeaways

Our preliminary results show that at a time of more and stronger open data policies, paying for data publication remains far from straightforward, with much of the burden passed along to individual researchers.

Concerns about funding for open data can have real impacts on research availability and publication choice. More than 15% of our participants indicated that they have collected data in the last few years that they have been unable to archive due to lack of funds. Meanwhile, over 40% say that when choosing which journal(s) to submit to, sponsorship of the Dryad DPC does, or at least may, influence their decision.

The good news it that during our 8-month pilot implementation period, the US National Science foundation sponsored nearly 200 Data Publishing Charges for which researchers would otherwise have been responsible.

We at Dryad are committed to finding and implementing solutions, and very much appreciate the feedback and support we receive from the research and publishing community. Stay tuned for more lessons learned.

New Open Toolkit for Teaching File and Data Management

The ETD+ Toolkit (https://educopia.org/publications/etdplustoolkit) is an approach to improving student and faculty research output management. Focusing on the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) as a mile-marker in a student’s research trajectory, it provides in-time advice to students and faculty about avoiding common digital loss scenarios for the ETD and all of its affiliated files.

The ETD+ Toolkit provides free introductory training resources on crucial data curation and digital longevity techniques. It has been designed as a training series to help students and faculty identify and offset risks and threats to their digital research footprints.

About the Toolkit

The ETD+ Toolkit is the result of a project (https://educopia.org/research/grants/etdplus) generously funded by the Institute of Library and Museum Services. Educopia Institute led the creation of the Toolkit in partnership with the NDLTD, ProQuest, bepress, and 12 U.S. research libraries.

What it is: 
An open set of six modules and evaluation instruments that prepare students to create, store, and maintain their research outputs on durable devices and in durable formats. Each is designed to stand alone; they may also be used as a series. 

What each module includes: 
Each module includes Learning Objectives, a one-page Handout, a Guidance Brief, a Slideshow with full presenter notes, and an evaluation Survey. Each module is released under a CC-BY license and all elements are openly editable to make reuse as easy as possible.

Who it is for: 
Anyone may freely adopt and adapt this toolkit. We especially recommend its use by administrators, faculty, and librarians teaching students and by students seeking practical advice about digital content management.   

Give us feedback (Please)
Like the modules? Hate them? Think they’re unique? Redundant? These materials have been produced under a grant-funded project, and we are requesting feedback that we can share with our funder and that we can use to improve the Toolkit. Please help us to refine the workshops and report back to our funder about how and where they are being used. Contact katherine@educopia.org and sam@educopia.org.

What Constitutes Peer Review of Data? A Survey of Peer Review Guidelines

New article from Scholarly Kitchen: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/04/11/what-constitutes-peer-review-research-data/

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The sharing of research data has exploded in the past decade, and a variety of publications and organizations are putting policies in place that require data publication in some form. Over the past decade, the number of journals that accept data has increased, as have the number and scope of repositories collecting and sharing research data. Prior to 2010, data sharing was quite limited in scholarly publishing. A 2011 study of 500 papers that were published in 2009 from 50 top-ranked research journals showed that only 47 papers (9%) of those reviewed had deposited full primary raw data online. During the intervening years, the pace of data publishing increased rapidly. As another study notes, the number of datasets being shared annually has increased by more than 400% from 2011 to 2015, and this pace will likely continue. A culture of data sharing is developing, and researchers are responding to data sharing requirements, the efficacy of data sharing, and its growing acceptance as a scientific norm in many fields.

The process is driven in part by both funding and publication policies, which have been encouraging data sharing. The number of titles that explicitly require such sharing in some form is also increasing rapidly. In the past few years, PLOS, AGU, SpringerNature, and the American Economic Association, to highlight just a few, have each put forward policies about data sharing. In addition, data access has been the focus of other efforts, such as..... READ MORE

Understanding patient data

https://understandingpatientdata.org.uk/

A newly set up group based at the Wellcome Trust in the UK.

"Understanding Patient Data has been set up to support better conversations about uses of health information. We think that responsible use of patient data has the potential to improve everyone’s health and deliver better care. It is important that everyone can find out how patient data is used and why, and understand more about the safeguards that are in place to protect patient confidentiality.   

Our aim is to develop tools and resources to help inform discussions and support responsible uses of data."

There are some great resources here e.g.

•  studies about how people feel about use of their data
• advice on words to use when talking about reuse of data
• identifyability demystified
• how is data kept safe

Machine-actionable data management plans (maDMPs)

White paper: Machine-actionable data management plans (maDMPs)

This report presents outputs of the International Digital Curation Conference 2017 workshop on machine-actionable data management plans. It contains community-generated use cases covering eight broad topics that reflect the needs of various stakeholders. It also articulates a consensus about the need for a common standard for machine-actionable data management plans to enable future work in this area.

See: http://riojournal.com/articles.php?id=13086 

Citation: Simms S, Jones S, Mietchen D, Miksa T (2017) Machine-actionable data management plans (maDMPs). Research Ideas and Outcomes 3: e13086. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.3.e13086

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)

The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with 29 publishers and a network of organizations, including the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the Internet Archive, Mozilla, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and many others, announced the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which aims to make citation data freely available for anyone to access. DataCite is a founding member.

See Initiave for Open Citations: https://i4oc.org/ 

Related blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/04/06/initiative-for-open-citations/

Preserving data at risk

"This document is intended to describe considerations for data rescue activities in relation to the day-to-day work of existing federal and federally-funded [USA] Earth science data archiving organizations". See:

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4816474.v1

Citation:

mayernik@ucar.edu; rdowns@ciesin.columbia.edu; Duerr, Ruth; hou@ucar.edu; natalie@cos.io; nancy.ritchey@noaa.gov; Thomer, Andrea; yarmel@rpi.edu (2017): Stronger together: the case for cross-sector collaboration in identifying and preserving at-risk data. figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4816474.v1