Understanding Data Search as a Socio-technical Practice

Open research data are heralded as having the potential to increase effectiveness, productivity, and reproducibility in science, but little is known about the actual practices involved in data search. The socio-technical problem of locating data for reuse is often reduced to the technological dimension of designing data search systems. We combine a bibliometric study of the current academic discourse around data search with interviews with data seekers. In this article, we explore how adopting a contextual, socio-technical perspective can help to understand user practices and behavior and ultimately help to improve the design of data discovery systems.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, 7 table

Recommended versus Certified Repositories: Mind the Gap

Researchers are increasingly required to make research data publicly available in data repositories. Although several organisations propose criteria to recommend and evaluate the quality of data repositories, there is no consensus of what constitutes a good data repository. In this paper, we investigate, first, which data repositories are recommended by various stakeholders (publishers, funders, and community organizations) and second, which repositories are certified by a number of organisations. We then compare these two lists of repositories, and the criteria for recommendation and certification. We find that criteria used by organisations recommending and certifying repositories are similar, although the certification criteria are generally more detailed. We distil the lists of criteria into seven main categories: “Mission”, “Community/Recognition”, “Legal and Contractual Compliance”, “Access/Accessibility”, “Technical Structure/Interface”, “Retrievability” and “Preservation”. Although the criteria are similar, the lists of repositories that are recommended by the various agencies are very different. Out of all of the recommended repositories, less than 6% obtained certification. As certification is becoming more important, steps should be taken to decrease this gap between recommended and certified repositories, and ensure that certification standards become applicable, and applied, to the repositories which researchers are currently using

Research Data Management Practices: Synergies and Discords between Researchers and Institutions

The aim of this study was to explore the synergies and discords in attitudes towards research data management (RDM) drivers and barriers for both researchers and institutions. Previous work has studied RDM from a single perspective, but not compared researchers’ and institutions’ perspectives. We carried out qualitative interviews with researchers as well as institutional representatives to identify drivers and barriers, and to explore synergies and discords of both towards RDM. We mapped these to a data lifecycle model and found that the contradictions occur at early stages in the lifecycle of data and the synergies occur at the later stages. This means that for future successful RDM, the points of discord at the start of the data lifecycle must be overcome. Finally, we conclude by proposing key recommendations that could help institutions when addressing both researcher and institutional RDM needs

Bringing Citations and Usage Metrics Together to Make Data Count

Over the last years, many organizations have been working on infrastructure to facilitate sharing and reuse of research data. This means that researchers now have ways of making their data available, but not necessarily incentives to do so. Several Research Data Alliance (RDA) working groups have been working on ways to start measuring activities around research data to provide input for new Data Level Metrics (DLMs). These DLMs are a critical step towards providing researchers with credit for their work. In this paper, we describe the outcomes of the work of the Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) working group and the Data Usage Metrics working group. The Scholix working group developed a framework that allows organizations to expose and discover links between articles and datasets, thereby providing an indication of data citations. The Data Usage Metrics group works on a standard for the measurement and display of Data Usage Metrics. Here we explain how publishers and data repositories can contribute to and benefit from these initiatives. Together, these contributions feed into several hubs that enable data repositories to start displaying DLMs. Once these DLMs are available, researchers are in a better position to make their data count and be rewarded for their work

A Comparison of Automated Journal Recommender Systems

Choosing the right journal for an article can be a challenge. Automated manuscript matching can help authors with the decision by recommending suitable journals based on user-defined criteria. Several approaches for efficient matching have been proposed in the research literature. However, only a few actual recommender systems are available for end users. In this paper, we present an overview of available services and compare their key characteristics such as input values, functionalities, and privacy. We conduct a quantitative analysis of their recommendation results: (a) examining the overlap in the results and pointing out the similarities among them; (b) evaluating their quality with a comparison of their accuracy. Due to the providers’ lack of transparency about the used technologies, the results cannot be easily interpreted. This highlights the need for openness about the used algorithms and data sets

DataCite - Assigning DOIs for FAIR research outputs

The presentation introduces DataCite, its memberships and its Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)

Expression and neural correlates of schizophrenia risk gene ZNF804A

Genome wide association studies have provided evidence for a significant association between ZNF804A (zinc finger protein 804A) - specifically the intronic single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs1344706 - and schizophrenia, but little is known about the function of the gene or the effects of the SNP. By studying post-mortem human brain tissue, I characterised ZNF804A immunoreactivity in adult and foetal human brain and investigated effects of diagnosis and rs1344706 genotype on ZNF804A mRNA and protein expression. Secondly, I looked in a large sample of healthy volunteers (n=922) at the effects of rs1344706 on brain structure using volumetry and voxel based morphometry (VBM). Furthermore, I recruited healthy volunteers who were either homozygous for the risk allele or homozygous for the non-risk allele (n=50). They participated in magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetic resonance (MR) sessions in which brain activity was measured during a working memory task, a visual processing task, and rest. Using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, also neurotransmitter levels were assessed. The experiments conducted for this thesis showed for the first time that ZNF804A immunoreactivity can be detected in both foetal and adult human brain and that it is mainly localised to layer III pyramidal cells, with a granular subcellular distribution throughout the cytoplasm. No effect of rs1344706 on mRNA and protein expression was found. In our structural MRI study, rs1344706 did not affect macroscopic brain structure as measured by volumetry and VBM, and given the large sample size, this seems a convincing negative. However, we did find that rs1344706 alters prefrontal-hippocampal connectivity, with increased connectivity being observed in risk homozygotes. Additionally, using MEG, we found an effect of ZNF804A genotype on hippocampal connectivity in the theta band (4-8Hz), with non-risk homozygotes displaying more connectivity. This finding provides a first clue as to the mechanisms that might underlie the previously observed effects of rs1344706 on prefrontal-hippocampal connectivity. Future studies will need to elucidate the actual function of the ZNF804A protein, in order to bridge the gap between the molecular and neuroimaging findings described in this thesis.</p

PIDs &amp; Preservation: Incorporating persistent identifiers in a preservation strategy

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Brokerage Event Towards a FAIR Compliant Commons in the ASREN Region – Guide for the Hands-on tutorial

This presentation contains the guide for the Hands-on tutorial at the Brokerage Event Towards a FAIR Compliant Commons in the ASREN Region, which is part of the program of the 16th International Open Repositories Conference (OR2021)

PIDs & Preservation - iPRES 2019 Amsterdam

A persistent identifier (PID) provides a long-lasting reference to an entity. PIDs should be open and unique and should resolve to a digital representation of the entity. Used in this way, PIDs can serve as an important component in digital preservation strategies for academic resources. In this panel discussion, representatives from leading PID organizations will explore roles that PIDs can play in digital preservation strategies. We invite the participants to engage in a conversation on how PID providers can work with the preservation community, and what preservation strategies they should be deploying with PID metadata