Data curation standards and social science occupational information resources

Occupational information resources - data about the characteristics of different occupational positions - are widely used in the social sciences, across a range of disciplines and international contexts. They are available in many formats, most often constituting small electronic files that are made freely downloadable from academic web-pages. However there are several challenges associated with how occupational information resources are distributed to, and exploited by, social researchers. In this paper we describe features of occupational information resources, and indicate the role digital curation can play in exploiting them. We report upon the strategies used in the GEODE research project (Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment, http://www.geode.stir.ac.uk). This project attempts to develop long-term standards for the distribution of occupational information resources, by providing a standardized framework-based electronic depository for occupational information resources, and by providing a data indexing service, based on e-Science middleware, which collates occupational information resources and makes them readily accessible to non-specialist social scientists

Data curation standards and the messy world of social science occupational information resources

Occupational information resources – data about the characteristics of different occupational positions – play a unique role in social science research. They are of relevance across diverse research disciplines and in numerous disparate contexts. They are also very widely available, typically freely downloadable from research-oriented academic web-pages. But they are also one of the most uncoordinated types of information resource that social scientists routinely come across. In this paper we describe issues in curating occupational information resources during the GEODE research project (Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment, http:/www.geode.stir.ac.uk). This project attempts to develop long-term standards for the distribution of occupational information resources, by providing a standardised framework electronic depository for occupational information resources, and by providing a data-indexing service, premised upon eScience middleware, which collates occupational information resources and makes them readily accessible to non-specialist social scientists

Theory and Practice of Data Citation

Citations are the cornerstone of knowledge propagation and the primary means of assessing the quality of research, as well as directing investments in science. Science is increasingly becoming "data-intensive", where large volumes of data are collected and analyzed to discover complex patterns through simulations and experiments, and most scientific reference works have been replaced by online curated datasets. Yet, given a dataset, there is no quantitative, consistent and established way of knowing how it has been used over time, who contributed to its curation, what results have been yielded or what value it has. The development of a theory and practice of data citation is fundamental for considering data as first-class research objects with the same relevance and centrality of traditional scientific products. Many works in recent years have discussed data citation from different viewpoints: illustrating why data citation is needed, defining the principles and outlining recommendations for data citation systems, and providing computational methods for addressing specific issues of data citation. The current panorama is many-faceted and an overall view that brings together diverse aspects of this topic is still missing. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the lay of the land for data citation, both from the theoretical (the why and what) and the practical (the how) angle.Comment: 24 pages, 2 tables, pre-print accepted in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 201

Socially Necessary Impact/Time: Notes on the Acceleration of Academic Labor, Metrics and the Transnational Association of Capitals

This article constitutes a contribution to the critique of the political economy of contemporary higher education. Its notes form, intended to open "windows" on the thorny issue of metrics permeating academia on both the local/national and global levels, facilitates a conceptualization of the academic law of value as a mechanism responsible for regulating the tempo and speed of academic labor in a higher education system subsumed under capital. First, it begins with a presentation of the Marxist approach to acceleration and measure. Second, it presents the academic law of value as a socially necessary impact/time. Third, it conceptualizes a figure of capital that operates in the contemporary global higher education system. Fourth, it describes the conditions of operation of merchant capital within higher education and explores the close links of global university rankings, metadata providers, and the academic publishing industry. As a fifth and final point, the analysis turns to Central Eastern Europe and the case study of Poland to demonstrate that, to function properly, the academic law of value needs to be imposed by political means, that is, through policy reforms that establish and legitimize the sets of parameters and criteria for the evaluation of academic labor. In conclusion, the argument suggests that the domination of merchant capital over academic labor, resulting in the latter's ongoing and uncontrolled acceleration, cannot be overcome without addressing not so much the issue of private property but, first and foremost, the politically and socially defined metrics

SEAD Virtual Archive: Building a Federation of Institutional Repositories for Long Term Data Preservation

Major research universities are grappling with their response to the deluge of scientific data emerging through research by their faculty. Many are looking to their libraries and the institutional repository as a solution. Scientific data introduces substantial challenges that the document-based institutional repository may not be suited to deal with. The Sustainable Environment - Actionable Data (SEAD) Virtual Archive specifically addresses the challenges of “long tail” scientific data. In this paper, we propose requirements, policy and architecture to support not only the preservation of scientific data today using institutional repositories, but also its rich access and use into the future

Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge

What will researchers be publishing in the future? Whilst there is little question that the Web will be the publication platform, as scholars move away from paper towards digital content, there is a need for mechanisms that support the production of self-contained units of knowledge and facilitate the publication, sharing and reuse of such entities.

 In this paper we discuss the notion of _research objects_, semantically rich aggregations of resources, that can possess some scientific intent or support some research objective. We present a number of principles that we expect such objects and their associated services to follow