Chemical information matters: an e-Research perspective on information and data sharing in the chemical sciences

Recently, a number of organisations have called for open access to scientific information and especially to the data obtained from publicly funded research, among which the Royal Society report and the European Commission press release are particularly notable. It has long been accepted that building research on the foundations laid by other scientists is both effective and efficient. Regrettably, some disciplines, chemistry being one, have been slow to recognise the value of sharing and have thus been reluctant to curate their data and information in preparation for exchanging it. The very significant increases in both the volume and the complexity of the datasets produced has encouraged the expansion of e-Research, and stimulated the development of methodologies for managing, organising, and analysing "big data". We review the evolution of cheminformatics, the amalgam of chemistry, computer science, and information technology, and assess the wider e-Science and e-Research perspective. Chemical information does matter, as do matters of communicating data and collaborating with data. For chemistry, unique identifiers, structure representations, and property descriptors are essential to the activities of sharing and exchange. Open science entails the sharing of more than mere facts: for example, the publication of negative outcomes can facilitate better understanding of which synthetic routes to choose, an aspiration of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge. The protagonists of open notebook science go even further and exchange their thoughts and plans. We consider the concepts of preservation, curation, provenance, discovery, and access in the context of the research lifecycle, and then focus on the role of metadata, particularly the ontologies on which the emerging chemical Semantic Web will depend. Among our conclusions, we present our choice of the "grand challenges" for the preservation and sharing of chemical information

Ideation as an intellectual information acquisition and use context: Investigating game designers’ information-based ideation behavior

Human Information Behavior (HIB) research commonly examines behavior in the context of why information is acquired and how it will be used, but usually at the level of the work or everyday-life tasks the information will support. HIB has not been examined in detail at the broader contextual level of intellectual purpose (i.e. the higher-order conceptual tasks the information was acquired to support). Examination at this level can enhance holistic understanding of HIB as a ‘means to an intellectual end’ and inform the design of digital information environments that support information interaction for specific intellectual purposes. We investigate information-based ideation (IBI) as a specific intellectual information acquisition and use context by conducting Critical Incident-style interviews with ten game designers, focusing on how they interact with information to generate and develop creative design ideas. Our findings give rise to a framework of their ideation-focused HIB, which systems designers can leverage to reason about how best to support certain behaviors to drive design ideation. These findings emphasize the importance of intellectual purpose as a driver for acquisition and desired outcome of use

Supporting emerging researchers in data management and curation

While scholarly publishing remains the key means for determining researchers’ impact, international funding body requirements and government recommendations relating to research data management (RDM), sharing and preservation mean that the underlying research data are becoming increasingly valuable in their own right. This is true not only for researchers in the sciences but also in the humanities and creative arts as well. The ability to exploit their own - and others’ - data is emerging as a crucial skill for researchers across all disciplines. However, despite Generation Y researchers being ‘highly competent and ubiquitous users of information technologies generally’ they appears to be a widespread lack of understanding and uncertainty about open access and self-archived resources (Jisc study, 2012). This chapter will consider the potential support that academic librarians might provide to support Generation Y researchers in this shifting research data landscape and examine the role of the library as part of institutional infrastructure. The changing landscape will impact research libraries most keenly over the next few years as they work to develop infrastructure and support systems to identify and maintain access to a diverse array of research data outputs. However, the data that are being produced through research are no different to those being produced by artists, politicians and the general public. In this respect, all libraries - whether they be academic, national, or local - will need to be gearing up to ensure they are able to accept and provide access to an ever increasing range of complex digital objects

Libraries and the management of research data

A discussion of the role of university libraries in the management of digital research data outputs. Reviews some of the recent history of progress in this area from a UK perspective, with reference to international developments

Sharing Qualitative and Qualitative Longitudinal Data in the UK: Archiving Strategies and Development

Over the past two decades significant developments have occurred in the archiving of qualitative data in the UK. The first national archive for qualitative resources, Qualidata, was established in 1994. Since that time further scientific reviews have supported the expansion of data resources for qualitative and qualitative longitudinal (QL) research in the UK and fuelled the development of a new ethos of data sharing and re-use among qualitative researchers. These have included the Timescapes Study and Archive, an initiative funded from 2007 to scale up QL research and create a specialist resource of QL data for sharing and re-use. These trends are part of a wider movement to enhance the status of research data in all their diverse forms, inculcate an ethos of data sharing, and develop infrastructure to facilitate data discovery and re-use. In this paper we trace the history of these developments and provide an overview of data policy initiatives that have set out to advance data sharing in the UK. The paper reveals a mixed infrastructure for qualitative and QL data resources in the UK, and explores the value of this, along with the implications for managing and co-ordinating resources across a complex network. The paper concludes with some suggestions for developing this mixed infrastructure to further support data sharing and re-use in the UK and beyond