8 research outputs found
A Grand Challenges-Based Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication and Information Science [MIT Grand Challenge PubPub Participation Platform]
Identifying Grand Challenges
A global and multidisciplinary community of stakeholders came together in March 2018 to identify, scope, and prioritize a common vision for specific grand research challenges related to the fields of information science and scholarly communications. The participants included domain researchers in academia, practitioners, and those who are aiming to democratize scholarship. An explicit goal of the summit was to identify research needs related to barriers in the development of scalable, interoperable, socially beneficial, and equitable systems for scholarly information; and to explore the development of non-market approaches to governing the scholarly knowledge ecosystem.
To spur discussion and exploration, grand challenge provocations were suggested by participants and framed into one of three sections: scholarly discovery, digital curation and preservation, and open scholarship. A few people participated in three segments, but most only attended discussions around a single topic.
To create the guest list of desired participants within our three workshop target areas we invited a distribution of expertise providing diversity across several facets. In addition to having expertise in the specific focus area, we aimed for the participants in each track to be diverse across sectors, disciplines, and regions of the world. Each track had approximately 20-25 people from different parts of the world—including the United States, European Union, South Africa, and India. Domain researchers brought perspectives from a range of scientific disciplines, while practitioners brought perspectives from different roles (drawn from commercial, non-profit, and governmental sectors). Notwithstanding, we were constrained by our social networks, and by the location of the workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts— and most of the participants were affiliated with US and European institutions.
During our discussions, it quickly became clear that the grand challenges themselves cannot be neatly categorized into discovery, curation and preservation, and open scholarship—or even, for that matter, limited to library science and information sciences. Several cross-cutting themes emerged, such as a strong need to include underrepresented voices and communities outside of mainstream publishing and academic institutions, a need to identify incentives that will motivate people to make changes in their own approaches and processes toward a more open and trusted framework, and a need to identify collaborators and partners from multiple disciplines in order to build strong programs.
The discussions were full of energy, insights, and enthusiasm for inclusive participation—and concluded with a desire for a global call to action to spark changes that will enable more equitable and open scholarship. Some important and productive tensions surfaced in our discussions, particularly around the best paths forward on the challenges we identified. On many core topics, however, there was widespread agreement among participants, especially on the urgent need to address the exclusion of knowledge production and access of so many people around the globe, and the troubling overrepresentation in the scholarly record of white, male, English-language voices. Ultimately, all agreed that we have an obligation to better enrich and greatly expand this space so that our communities can be catalysts for change.
Towards a more inclusive, open, equitable, and sustainable scholarly knowledge ecosystem: Vision; Broadest impacts; Recommendations for broad impact.
Research landscape: Challenges, threats, and barriers; Challenges to participation in the research community; Restrictions on forms of knowledge; Threats to integrity and trust; Threats to the durability of knowledge; Threats to individual agency; Incentives to sustain a scholarly knowledge ecosystem that is inclusive, equity, trustworthy, and sustainable; Grand Challenges research areas; Recommendations for research areas and programs.
Targeted research questions, research challenges: Legal economic, policy, and organizational design for enduring, equitable, open scholarship; Measuring, predicting, and adapting to use and utility across scholarly communities; Designing and governing algorithms in the scholarly knowledge ecosystem to support accountability, credibility, and agency; Integrating oral and tacit knowledge into the scholarly knowledge ecosystem.
Integrating research, practice, and policy: The need for leadership to coordinate research, policy, and practice initiatives; Role of libraries and archives as advocates and collaborators; Incorporating values of openness, sustainability, and equity into scholarly infrastructure and practice; Funders, catalysts, and coordinators; Recommendations for integrating research, practice, and policy
Generic Metadata Handling in Scientific Data Life Cycles
Scientific data life cycles define how data is created, handled, accessed, and analyzed by users. Such data life cycles become increasingly sophisticated as the sciences they deal with become more and more demanding and complex with the coming advent of exascale data and computing. The overarching data life cycle management background includes multiple abstraction categories with data sources, data and metadata management, computing and workflow management, security, data sinks, and methods on how to enable utilization. Challenges in this context are manifold. One is to hide the complexity from the user and to enable seamlessness in using resources to usability and efficiency. Another one is to enable generic metadata management that is not restricted to one use case but can be adapted with limited effort to further ones.
Metadata management is essential to enable scientists to save time by avoiding the need for manually keeping track of data, meaning for example by its content and location. As the number of files grows into the millions, managing data without metadata becomes increasingly difficult. Thus, the solution is to employ metadata management to enable the organization of data based on information about it. Previously, use cases tended to only support highly specific or no metadata management at all. Now, a generic metadata management concept is available that can be used to efficiently integrate metadata capabilities with use cases.
The concept was implemented within the MoSGrid data life cycle that enables molecular simulations on distributed HPC-enabled data and computing infrastructures. The implementation enables easy-to-use and effective metadata management. Automated extraction, annotation, and indexing of metadata was designed, developed, integrated, and search capabilities provided via a seamless user interface. Further analysis runs can be directly started based on search results. A complete evaluation of the concept both in general and along the example implementation is presented. In conclusion, generic metadata management concept advances the state of the art in scientific date life cycle management
CLARIN
The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium
CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources
CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future.
The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU)
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation
The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation
The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase
CLARIN
The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium