Upgrading Academic Scholarship : Challenges and Chances of the Digital Age

Purpose: The paper is a discussion of what the beginning of the Internet Age means for the functions and structures of scholarly information and communication by looking at and evaluating today's usability and usage of the digital information infrastructure for and by academic scholarship. Design/methodology/approach: The paper gives an overview of the current state of development of digital information in the scholarly cultures and stresses the importance of data as the crucial - and considerably extended - basis of scholarly work. The central role of the publishing world for the academic rewards system is analyzed to consider continuities and discontinuities in scholarly publication. Findings: The paper advances the thesis first coined by Christine Borgman that today we have an information infrastructure of, but not one for scholarly information. Some ideas and proposals of what should be done to move towards an information infrastructure for scholarly work conclude the paper. Originality/value: The paper tries to bridge the gap between information professionals as producers and scholars as users of information and communication technologies and shows that a joint debate on these issues is necessary

Upgrading academic scholarship: challenges and chances of the digital age

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss what the beginning of the Internet Age means for the functions and structures of scholarly information and communication by looking at and evaluating today's usability and usage of the digital information infrastructure for and by academic scholarship. Design/ methodology/ approach: The paper gives an overview of the current state of development of digital information in the scholarly cultures and stresses the importance of data as the crucial – and considerably extended – basis of scholarly work. The central role of the publishing world for the academic rewards system is analyzed to consider continuities and discontinuities in scholarly publication. Findings: The paper advances the thesis first coined by Christine Borgman that today we have an information infrastructure of, but not for, scholarly information. Some ideas and proposals of what should be done to move towards an information infrastructure for scholarly work conclude the paper. Originality/ value: The paper tries to bridge the gap between information professionals as producers and scholars as users of information and communication technologies and shows that a joint debate on these issues is necessary

Research Data: Who will share what, with whom, when, and why?

The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary to examine the arguments for sharing data and how those arguments match the motivations and interests of the scientific community and the public. Four arguments are examined: to make the results of publicly funded data available to the public, to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, to advance the state of science, and to reproduce research. Libraries need to consider their role in the face of each of these arguments, and what expertise and systems they require for data curation.

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of 'grey data' about individuals in their daily activities of research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. The boundaries between research and grey data are blurring, making it more difficult to assess the risks and responsibilities associated with any data collection. Many sets of data, both research and grey, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are exploiting these data for research, learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities are besieging universities with requests for access to data or for partnerships to mine them. The privacy frontier facing research universities spans open access practices, uses and misuses of data, public records requests, cyber risk, and curating data for privacy protection. This paper explores the competing values inherent in data stewardship and makes recommendations for practice, drawing on the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information security, data governance, and cyber risk.Comment: Final published version, Sept 30, 201

From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web

In the process of scientific research, many information objects are generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary, multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST

Text Data Mining from the Author's Perspective: Whose Text, Whose Mining, and to Whose Benefit?

Given the many technical, social, and policy shifts in access to scholarly content since the early days of text data mining, it is time to expand the conversation about text data mining from concerns of the researcher wishing to mine data to include concerns of researcher-authors about how their data are mined, by whom, for what purposes, and to whose benefits.Comment: Forum Statement: Data Mining with Limited Access Text: National Forum. April 5-6, 2018. https://publish.illinois.edu/limitedaccess-tdm

Upgrading Academic Scholarship : Challenges and Chances of the Digital Age

Purpose: The paper is a discussion of what the beginning of the Internet Age means for the functions and structures of scholarly information and communication by looking at and evaluating today's usability and usage of the digital information infrastructure for and by academic scholarship. Design/methodology/approach: The paper gives an overview of the current state of development of digital information in the scholarly cultures and stresses the importance of data as the crucial - and considerably extended - basis of scholarly work. The central role of the publishing world for the academic rewards system is analyzed to consider continuities and discontinuities in scholarly publication. Findings: The paper advances the thesis first coined by Christine Borgman that today we have an information infrastructure of, but not one for scholarly information. Some ideas and proposals of what should be done to move towards an information infrastructure for scholarly work conclude the paper. Originality/value: The paper tries to bridge the gap between information professionals as producers and scholars as users of information and communication technologies and shows that a joint debate on these issues is necessary

Research Data: who will share what, with whom, when, and why?

"The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary to examine the arguments for sharing data and how those arguments match the motivations and interests of the scientific community and the public. Four arguments are examined: to make the results of publicly funded data available to the public, to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, to advance the state of science, and to reproduce research. Libraries need to consider their role in the face of each of these arguments, and what expertise and systems they require for data curation." [author's abstract

Reuse remix recycle: repurposing archaeological digital data

Preservation of digital data is predicated on the expectation of its reuse, yet that expectation has never been examined within archaeology. While we have extensive digital archives equipped to share data, evidence of reuse seems paradoxically limited. Most archaeological discussions have focused on data management and preservation and on disciplinary practices surrounding archiving and sharing data. This article addresses the reuse side of the data equation through a series of linked questions: What is the evidence for reuse, what constitutes reuse, what are the motivations for reuse, and what makes some data more suitable for reuse than others? It concludes by posing a series of questions aimed at better understanding our digital engagement with archaeological data