International Survey of Research University Faculty: Data Management and Archiving Needs - Published

(From an email sent to the JISC-REPOSITORIES list)

Primary Research Group Inc. has published the International Survey of Research University Faculty: Data Management and Archiving Needs, ISBN 978-157440-496-8

This report, based on responses from 104 faculty from research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, looks closely at the data archiving, curation and management needs of faculty in data intensive fields such as medicine, chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, statistics and mathematics, engineering, economics and finance, sociology and political science and other data-intensive fields.

The 114-page report reveals the extent to which faculty are impacted by data management and archiving requirements from co-authors, funding sources, academic departments, scholarly publications, data repositories, regulatory bodies, and others with data management requirements.

Data in the report is broken out by many personal and institutional criteria including: age, gender, tenure status, teaching load, subject specialty and academic title of the survey participant, and country of origin, public/private status, and world university ranking of the university affiliated with the survey participant, among other variables.  The study looks at how many scholars have imposed data access restrictions on their archived data, and for what reasons or following the strictures of what kind of organization or circumstance. The study also looks at which individuals or offices handle data archiving needs: the individual scholar, academic library, academic department, office of research or other venue.

Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:

Nearly two thirds of post docs and fellows said that the data requirements of journal publishers impacted their work, the highest percentage saying so among all academic titles.

Scholars in physics and astronomy were the most likely to say that the data requirements of funding sources impacted their work.

Researchers based in the UK/Ireland were the most likely to say that there is a great or good deal of need for data management and archiving services (30.77%), followed by those in the U.S./Canada (22.66%) and those in Australia/New Zealand (20.00%).

 For 2.91% of those sampled, the university office of research handles data archiving needs.

11.65% of those surveyed have had to impose data access restrictions to their data to meet terms of an intellectual property agreement.

To view a table of contents, an excerpt, the survey questionnaire and a list of the institutional affiliations of the survey participants – or to place an order – view the product page for this report at:

http://www.primaryresearch.com/AddCart.aspx?ReportID=477

Or call us at 212-736-2316 or email your order to: jmoses@primaryresearch.com.

Research data - what does it *really* look like?

Interesting post from Jenny Mitcham at the University of York on the types of files that they are being asked to curate.

https://digital-archiving.blogspot.com.au/2016/05/research-data-what-does-it-really-look.html


Work continues on our Filling the Digital Preservation Gap project and I thought it was about time we updated you on some of the things we have been doing.

While my colleague Julie has been focusing on the more technical issues of implementing Archivematica for research data. I have been looking at some real research data and exploring in more detail some of the issues we discussed in ourphase 1 report.

For the past year, we have been accepting research data for longer term curation. Though the systems for preservation and access to this data are still in development, we are for the time being able to allocate a DOI for each dataset, manage access and store it safely (ensuring it isn't altered) and intend to ingest it into our data curation systems once they are ready.

Having this data in one place on our filestore does give me the opportunity to test the hypothesis in our first report about the wide range of file formats that will be present in a research dataset and also the assertion that many of these will not be identified by the tools and registries in use for the creation of technical metadata.

So, I have done a fairly quick piece of analysis on the research data, running a tool called Droid developed by The National Archives over the data to get an indication of whether the files can be recognised and identified in an automated fashion.
More

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