39,912 research outputs found
Mandated data archiving greatly improves access to research data
The data underlying scientific papers should be accessible to researchers
both now and in the future, but how best can we ensure that these data are
available? Here we examine the effectiveness of four approaches to data
archiving: no stated archiving policy, recommending (but not requiring)
archiving, and two versions of mandating data deposition at acceptance. We
control for differences between data types by trying to obtain data from papers
that use a single, widespread population genetic analysis, STRUCTURE. At one
extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the
inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds
of finding the data online almost a thousand-fold compared to having no policy.
However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only
very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. At one extreme, we found
that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data
availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data
online almost a thousand fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving
rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher
than those with no policy at all. We also assessed the effectiveness of asking
for data directly from authors and obtained over half of the requested
datasets, albeit with about 8 days delay and some disagreement with authors.
Given the long term benefits of data accessibility to the academic community,
we believe that journal based mandatory data archiving policies and mandatory
data availability statements should be more widely adopted
Online Scientific Data Curation, Publication, and Archiving
Science projects are data publishers. The scale and complexity of current and
future science data changes the nature of the publication process. Publication
is becoming a major project component. At a minimum, a project must preserve
the ephemeral data it gathers. Derived data can be reconstructed from metadata,
but metadata is ephemeral. Longer term, a project should expect some archive to
preserve the data. We observe that pub-lished scientific data needs to be
available forever ? this gives rise to the data pyramid of versions and to data
inflation where the derived data volumes explode. As an example, this article
describes the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) strategies for data publication,
data access, curation, and preservation.Comment: original at
http://research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2002-7
CLEAR: a credible method to evaluate website archivability
Web archiving is crucial to ensure that cultural, scientific
and social heritage on the web remains accessible and usable
over time. A key aspect of the web archiving process is optimal data extraction from target websites. This procedure is
difficult for such reasons as, website complexity, plethora of
underlying technologies and ultimately the open-ended nature of the web. The purpose of this work is to establish
the notion of Website Archivability (WA) and to introduce
the Credible Live Evaluation of Archive Readiness (CLEAR)
method to measure WA for any website. Website Archivability captures the core aspects of a website crucial in diagnosing whether it has the potentiality to be archived with completeness and accuracy. An appreciation of the archivability
of a web site should provide archivists with a valuable tool
when assessing the possibilities of archiving material and in-
uence web design professionals to consider the implications
of their design decisions on the likelihood could be archived.
A prototype application, archiveready.com, has been established to demonstrate the viabiity of the proposed method
for assessing Website Archivability
Survey Data Documentation
Documentation of research results is an essential process within the research lifecycle, which includes the steps of study planning and developing the survey instruments, data collection and preparation, data analysis, and data archiving. Primary researchers have to ensure that the collected data and all accompanying materials are properly documented and archived. This enables the scientific community to understand and reproduce the results of a scientific project. The purpose of this survey guideline is to provide a brief introduction and an overview about data preparation and data documentation in order to help primary researchers to make their data and other study-related materials long-term accessible. This overview will therefore help researchers to comply with the principles of reproducibility as a crucial aspect of good scientific practice. This guideline will be useful for researchers who are in the stages of planning a study as well as for those who have already collected data and would like to prepare it for archiving
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