Permanent Objects, Disposable Systems

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 01:00 PM – 02:30 PMThe California Digital Library (CDL) preservation program is re-envisioning its curation infrastructure as a set of loosely-coupled, distributed micro-services. There are many monolithic systems that support a range of preservation activities but also require the user and the hosting institution to buy-in to a particular system culture. The result is an institution that becomes, say, a DSpace, Fedora, or LOCKSS "shop", with a specific worldview and set of object flows and structures that will eventually need to be abandoned when it comes time to transition to the next system. Experience shows that these transitions are unavoidable, despite claims that once an object is in the system, it will be safe forever. In view of this it is safer and more cost-effective to acknowledge from the outset the inevitable transient nature of systems and to plan on managing, rather than resisting change. The disruption caused by change can be mitigated by basing curation services on simple universal structures and protocols (e.g., filesystems, HTTP) and micro-services that operate on them. We promote a "mix and match" approach in which appropriate content- and context-specific curation workflows can be nimbly constructed by combining necessary functions drawn from a granular set of independent micro-services. Micro-services, whether deployed in isolation or in combination, are especially suited to exploitation upstream towards content creators who normally don't want to think about preservation, especially if it's costly; compared to buying into an entire curation culture, it is easy to adopt a small, inexpensive tool that requires very little commitment. We see digital curation as an ongoing process of enrichment at all stages in the lifecycle of a digital object. Because the early developmental stages are so critical to an object's health and longevity, it is desirable to push curation "best practices" as far upstream towards the object creators as possible. If preservation is considered only when objects are close to retirement, it is often too late to correct the structural and semantic deficiencies that can impair object usability. The later the intervention, the more expensive the correction process, and it is always difficult to fund interventions for "has been" objects. In contrast, early stage curation challenges traditional practices. Traditionally, preservation actions are often based on end-stage processing, where objects are deposited "as is" and kept out of harm's way by limiting access (i.e., dark archives). While some systems are designed to be dark or "dim", with limited access and little regard for versioning or object enrichment, enrichment and access are now seen as necessary curation actions, that is, interventions for the sake of preservation. In particular, the darkness of an entire collection can change in the blink of an eye, for example, as the result of a court ruling or access rights purchase; turning the lights on for a collection should be as simple as throwing a switch, and not require transferring the collection from a "preservation repository" to an "access repository". Effective curation services must be flexible and easily configurable in order to respond appropriately to the wide diversity of content and content uses. To be most effective, not only should curation practices be pushed upstream but also they should be pushed out to many different contexts. The micro-services approach promotes the idea that curation is an outcome, not a place. Curation actions should be applied to content where it most usefully exists for the convenience of its creators or users. For example, high value digital assets in access repositories, or even scholars' desktops, would certainly benefit from such things as persistent identification or regular audits to discover and repair bit-level damage, functions usually available only in the context of a "preservation system" but now easily applied to content where it most usefully resides without requiring transfer to a central location

Curation Micro-Services: A Pipeline Metaphor for Repositories

The effective long-term curation of digital content requires expert analysis, policy setting, and decision making, and a robust technical infrastructure that can effect and enforce curation policies and implement appropriate curation activities. Since the number, size, and diversity of content under curation management will undoubtedly continue to grow over time, and the state of curation understanding and best practices relative to that content will undergo a similar constant evolution, one of the overarching design goals of a sustainable curation infrastructure is flexibility. In order to provide the necessary flexibility of deployment and configuration in the face of potentially disruptive changes in technology, institutional mission, and user expectation, a useful design metaphor is provided by the Unix pipeline, in which complex behavior is an emergent property of the coordinated action of a number of simple independent components. The decomposition of repository function into a highly granular and orthogonal set of independent but interoperable micro-services is consistent with the principles of prudent engineering practice. Since each micro-service is small and self-contained, they are individually more robust and collectively easier to implement and maintain. By being freely interoperable in various strategic combinations, any number of micro-services-based repositories can be easily constructed to meet specific administrative or technical needs. Importantly, since these repositories are purposefully built from policy neutral and protocol and platform independent components to provide the function minimally necessary for a specific context, they are not constrained to conform to an infrastructural monoculture of prepackaged repository solutions. The University of California Curation Center has developed an open source micro-services infrastructure that is being used to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University system and a number of non-university content partners. This paper provides a review of the conceptual design and technical implementation of this micro-services environment, a case study of initial deployment, and a look at ongoing micro-services developments

Curation Micro-Services: A Pipeline Metaphor for Repositories

The effective long-term curation of digital content requires expert analysis, policy setting, and decision making, and a robust technical infrastructure that can effect and enforce curation policies and implement appropriate curation activities. Since the number, size, and diversity of content under curation management will undoubtedly continue to grow over time, and the state of curation understanding and best practices relative to that content will undergo a similar constant evolution, one of the overarching design goals of a sustainable curation infrastructure is flexibility. In order to provide the necessary flexibility of deployment and configuration in the face of potentially disruptive changes in technology, institutional mission, and user expectation, a useful design metaphor is provided by the Unix pipeline, in which complex behavior is an emergent property of the coordinated action of a number of simple independent components. The decomposition of repository function into a highly granular and orthogonal set of independent but interoperable micro-services is consistent with the principles of prudent engineering practice. Since each micro-service is small and self-contained, they are individually more robust and collectively easier to implement and maintain. By being freely interoperable in various strategic combinations, any number of micro-services-based repositories can be easily constructed to meet specific administrative or technical needs. Importantly, since these repositories are purposefully built from policy neutral and protocol and platform independent components to provide the function minimally necessary for a specific context, they are not constrained to conform to an infrastructural monoculture of prepackaged repository solutions. The University of California Curation Center has developed an open source micro-services infrastructure that is being used to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University system and a number of non-university content partners. This paper provides a review of the conceptual design and technical implementation of this micro-services environment, a case study of initial deployment, and a look at ongoing micro-services developments

DMPTool 2: Expanding Functionality for Better Data Management Planning

Scholarly researchers today are increasingly required to engage in a range of data management planning activities to comply with institutional policies, or as a precondition for publication or grant funding. The latter is especially true in the U.S. in light of the recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) mandate aimed at maximizing the availability of all outputs – data as well as the publications that summarize them – resulting from federally-funded research projects. To aid researchers in creating effective data management plans (DMPs), a group of organizations – California Digital Library, DataONE, Digital Curation Centre, Smithsonian Institution, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Virginia Library – collaborated on the development of the DMPTool, an online application that helps researchers create data management plans. The DMPTool provides detailed guidance, links to general and institutional resources, and walks a researcher through the process of generating a comprehensive plan tailored to specific DMP requirements. The uptake of the DMPTool has been positive: to date, it has been used by over 6,000 researchers from 800 institutions, making use of more than 20 requirements templates customized for funding bodies. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, project partners are now engaged in enhancing the features of the DMPTool. The second version of the tool has enhanced functionality for plan creators and institutional administrators, as well as a redesigned user interface and an open RESTful application programming interface (API). New administrative functions provide the means for institutions to better support local research activities. New capabilities include support for plan co-ownership; workflow provisions for internal plan review; simplified maintenance and addition of DMP requirements templates; extensive capabilities for the customization of guidance and resources by local institutional administrators; options for plan visibility; and UI refinements based on user feedback and focus group testing. The technical work undertaken for the DMPTool Version 2 has been accompanied by a new governance structure and the growth of a community of engaged stakeholders who will form the basis for a sustainable path forward for the DMPTool as it continues to play an important role in research data management activities

DataCite: Lessons Learned on Persistent Identifiers for Research Data

Data are the infrastructure of science and they serve as the groundwork for scientific pursuits. Data publication has emerged as a game-changing breakthrough in scholarly communication. Data form the outputs of research but also are a gateway to new hypotheses, enabling new scientific insights and driving innovation. And yet stakeholders across the scholarly ecosystem, including practitioners, institutions, and funders of scientific research are increasingly concerned about the lack of sharing and reuse of research data. Across disciplines and countries, researchers, funders, and publishers are pushing for a more effective research environment, minimizing the duplication of work and maximizing the interaction between researchers. Availability, discoverability, and reproducibility of research outputs are key factors to support data reuse and make possible this new environment of highly collaborative research. An interoperable e-infrastructure is imperative in order to develop new platforms and services for to data publication and reuse. DataCite has been working to establish and promote methods to locate, identify and share information about research data. Along with service development, DataCite supports and advocates for the standards behind persistent identifiers (in particular DOIs, Digital Object Identifiers) for data and other research outputs. Persistent identifiers allow different platforms to exchange information consistently and unambiguously and provide a reliable way to track citations and reuse. Because of this, data publication can become a reality from a technical standpoint, but the adoption of data publication and data citation as a practice by researchers is still in its early stages. Since 2009, DataCite has been developing a series of tools and services to foster the adoption of data publication and citation among the research community. Through the years, DataCite has worked in a close collaboration with interdisciplinary partners on these issues and we have gained insight into the development of data publication workflows. This paper describes the types of different actions and the lessons learned by DataCite.

Connecting Researchers to Data Repositories in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences

The Repository Finder tool was developed to help researchers in the domain of Earth, space, and environmental sciences to identify appropriate repositories where they can deposit their research data and to promote practices that implement the FAIR Principles, encouraging progress toward sharing data that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Requirements for the design of the tool were gathered through a series of workshops and working groups as a part of the Enabling FAIR Data initiative led by the American Geophysical Union that included the development of a decision tree that researchers may follow in selecting a data repository, interviews with domain repository managers, and usability testing. The tool is hosted on the web by DataCite and enables a researcher to query all data repositories by keyword or to view a list of domain repositories that accept data for deposit, support open access, and provide persistent identifiers. Metadata records from the re3data.org registry of research data repositories and the returned results highlight repositories that have achieved trustworthy digital repository certification through a formal procedure such as the CoreTrust Seal

DataShare: Empowering Researcher Data Curation

Researchers are increasingly being asked to ensure that all products of research activity – not just traditional publications – are preserved and made widely available for study and reuse as a precondition for publication or grant funding, or to conform to disciplinary best practices. In order to conform to these requirements, scholars need effective, easy-to-use tools and services for the long-term curation of their research data. The DataShare service, developed at the University of California, is being used by researchers to: (1) prepare for curation by reviewing best practice recommendations for the acquisition or creation of digital research data; (2) select datasets using intuitive file browsing and drag-and-drop interfaces; (3) describe their data for enhanced discoverability in terms of the DataCite metadata schema; (4) preserve their data by uploading to a public access collection in the UC3 Merritt curation repository; (5) cite their data in terms of persistent and globally-resolvable DOI identifiers; (6) expose their data through registration with well-known abstracting and indexing services and major internet search engines; (7) control the dissemination of their data through enforceable data use agreements; and (8) discover and retrieve datasets of interest through a faceted search and browse environment. Since the widespread adoption of effective data management practices is highly dependent on ease of use and integration into existing individual, institutional, and disciplinary workflows, the emphasis throughout the design and implementation of DataShare is to provide the highest level of curation service with the lowest possible technical barriers to entry by individual researchers. By enabling intuitive, self-service access to data curation functions, DataShare helps to contribute to more widespread adoption of good data curation practices that are critical to open scientific inquiry, discourse, and advancement

Mast Cell Survival and Mediator Secretion in Response to Hypoxia

Tissue hypoxia is a consequence of decreased oxygen levels in different inflammatory conditions, many associated with mast cell activation. However, the effect of hypoxia on mast cell functions is not well established. Here, we have investigated the effect of hypoxia per se on human mast cell survival, mediator secretion, and reactivity. Human cord blood derived mast cells were subjected to three different culturing conditions: culture and stimulation in normoxia (21% O2); culture and stimulation in hypoxia (1% O2); or 24 hour culture in hypoxia followed by stimulation in normoxia. Hypoxia, per se, did not induce mast cell degranulation, but we observed an increased secretion of IL-6, where autocrine produced IL-6 promoted mast cell survival. Hypoxia did not have any effect on A23187 induced degranulation or secretion of cytokines. In contrast, cytokine secretion after LPS or CD30 treatment was attenuated, but not inhibited, in hypoxia compared to normoxia. Our data suggests that mast cell survival, degranulation and cytokine release are sustained under hypoxia. This may be of importance for host defence where mast cells in a hypoxic tissue can react to intruders, but also in chronic inflammations where mast cell reactivity is not inhibited by the inflammatory associated hypoxia

ORCID DE 2 – Konsolidierung der ORCID-Informationsinfrastruktur in Deutschland

[No abstract available

Nursing considerations to complement the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines

Objectives: To provide a series of recommendations based on the best available evidence to guide clinicians providing nursing care to patients with severe sepsis. Design: Modified Delphi method involving international experts and key individuals in subgroup work and electronic-based discussion among the entire group to achieve consensus. Methods: We used the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines as a framework to inform the structure and content of these guidelines. We used the Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) system to rate the quality of evidence from high (A) to very low (D) and to determine the strength of recommendations, with grade 1 indicating clear benefit in the septic population and grade 2 indicating less confidence in the benefits in the septic population. In areas without complete agreement between all authors, a process of electronic discussion of all evidence was undertaken until consensus was reached. This process was conducted independently of any funding. Results: Sixty-three recommendations relating to the nursing care of severe sepsis patients are made. Prevention recommendations relate to education, accountability, surveillance of nosocomial infections, hand hygiene, and prevention of respiratory, central line-related, surgical site, and urinary tract infections, whereas infection management recommendations related to both control of the infection source and transmission-based precautions. Recommendations related to initial resuscitation include improved recognition of the deteriorating patient, diagnosis of severe sepsis, seeking further assistance, and initiating early resuscitation measures. Important elements of hemodynamic support relate to improving both tissue oxygenation and macrocirculation. Recommendations related to supportive nursing care incorporate aspects of nutrition, mouth and eye care, and pressure ulcer prevention and management. Pediatric recommendations relate to the use of antibiotics, steroids, vasopressors and inotropes, fluid resuscitation, sedation and analgesia, and the role of therapeutic end points. Conclusion: Consensus was reached regarding many aspects of nursing care of the severe sepsis patient. Despite this, there is an urgent need for further evidence to better inform this area of critical care