Overview
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently issued a Request for Information welcoming comments and recommendations for ensuring long-term stewardship of, and broad public access to, digital data resulting from federally funded research. The Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) commends the OSTP for further exploring this topic.
The AAI (http://alexandriaarchive.org) is a non-profit organization that works to promote the dissemination and curation of digital scholarly resources. To this end, we developed Open Context (http://opencontext.org), a free, open access system for the publication of research content. Open Context demonstrates readily achievable ways to cultivate a distributed foundation for digital scholarship. Its methods for data portability enable researchers to work across silos and use a host of visualization, search and analysis tools. By leveraging archival and identity services offered by the University of California’s California Digital Library (CDL), Open Context gains a strong institutional foundation for permanent citation and archiving.
We are delighted to have the opportunity to weigh in on the topic of “public access to digital data.” Our responses to the questions posed in the RFI are based on ten years of exploration of issues around open access to digital data in the scholarly community. Below, we list our primary recommendations for encouraging public access to and preservation of digital data resulting from federally-funded research. Our responses to each of the RFI’s questions follow the recommendations and provide more details to support each recommendation.
The OSTP request is the most recent development in broad moves to foster improved access, transparency, and stewardship of scientific data. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and private foundations have invested in developing technologies, standards, and datasets to support research. While we applaud recent developments promoting scientific data integrity and accessibility, policy provisions need to be strengthened. Data sharing remains at the margins of professional practice (Nature Editors 2009). The scientific community needs to put greater emphasis on data access and reuse to promote more robust, analytically rigorous, and more replicable scientific inquiry. To do so, the OSTP should adopt a number of policies to clarify key requirements for maximizing the value of scientific data.
Summary Recommendations
Continued…
Posted in Policy.
Tagged with Cyberinfrastructure, data publishing, data sharing, distributed, open access, open government, open science, policy.
By admin
– January 12, 2012
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently issued a Request for Information (RFI) welcoming comments and recommendations for ensuring long-term stewardship of, and broad public access to, digital data resulting from federally funded research.
Our main recommendations are below. We also provided answers to the specific questions listed in the RFI. The full document is on Google Docs here. We welcome the community’s feedback and participation on this document. Feedback is due January 12, so please feel free to chime in by then.
Recommendations:
- Cultivate a distributed information ecosystem: Integration, synthesis, analysis, and visualization of scientific data can foster tremendous opportunities across the commercial, not-for-profit and academic sectors. Innovative approaches to information retrieval, search, aggregation and other applications of scientific data should be encouraged widely by many players. Agencies should foster an “open playing field” encouraging innovation in scientific data-management and fresh ideas to advance new workflows, organizational forms, and technologies. To cultivate an open playing field, agencies need to promote the free flow of scientific data across multiple platforms and applications using widely used open and non-proprietary standards and formats.
- Cultivate a robust preservation infrastructure: Qualified digital libraries and digital archives are needed to maintain the integrity and longevity of scientific data. But not every participant in science data sharing needs to be a repository. To encourage innovation and experimentation, “sustainability” should not be required of every dissemination, visualization, analysis or aggregation platform. Rather, sustainability efforts should focus on digital libraries and archives. Since our understanding of how to best preserve digital data continually evolves, policymakers need to encourage innovation and collaboration across a broad spectrum of public interest organizations, particularly libraries and museums dedicated to playing stewardship roles. Multiple models, approaches, and organizations should play a role in scientific data stewardship to encourage continual learning and innovation in data longevity practices.
- Encourage data professionalism: Federally-funded science both creates and reuses data. Scientific integrity requires proper publication (including documentation) of data, and proper attribution and sourcing of reused, reanalyzed datasets. Data publication (including various models of peer-review and disciplinary archiving) and citation practices need to be mandated for federally funded research.
- Require non-proprietary data: The purpose of public support of science is to expand human understanding, not to subsidize particular commercial publishing models. In general, primary scientific data should be as free from intellectual property and proprietary encumbrances as possible. Such encumbrances create legal risk and complexity that inhibit innovation around scientific data. Datasets should be in the public domain or under an open copyright license (such as the Creative Commons Attribution Licence) to widely encourage innovative approaches to data preservation and reuse.
- Data ethics: At the same time, the general need for minimized legal encumbrances should be balanced with data privacy and sensitivity issues. Human subjects research ethics, environmental and public health, and cultural property and indigenous rights needs require consideration. Defining ethical practices for data preservation, dissemination, and reuse will require broad-based, multi-stakeholder negotiations for different types of data in different scientific domains.
Posted in Reports.
Tagged with data sharing, feedback, policy.
By skansa
– January 6, 2012
The “dead tree” version of Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration is now available for purchase (only $39.95!) from the David Brown Book Company. A bound book is a tried and true technology and we’re very happy to see the book in print! As a bonus, we’ve put an Easter egg in the print version. Whoever discovers it first (and lets us know) gets a free beer! For those of you who feel comfortable reading a 295-page volume as a pdf, the book is also available at the University of California’s eScholarship repository. Archaeology 2.0 is the first book in the Cotsen Institute’s new Digital Archaeology Series.
Abstract: How is the Web transforming the professional practice of archaeology? And as archaeologists accustomed to dealing with “deep time,” how can we best understand the possibilities and limitations of the Web in meeting the specialized needs of professionals in this field? These are among the many questions posed and addressed in Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration, edited by Eric Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, and Ethan Watrall. With contributions from a range of experts in archaeology and technology, this volume is organized around four key topics that illuminate how the revolution in communications technology reverberates across the discipline: approaches to information retrieval and information access; practical and theoretical concerns inherent in design choices for archaeology’s computing infrastructure; collaboration through the development of new technologies that connect field-based researchers and specialists within an international archaeological community; and scholarly communications issues, with an emphasis on concerns over sustainability and preservation imperatives. This book not only describes practices that attempt to mitigate some of the problems associated with the Web, such as information overload and disinformation, it also presents compelling case studies of actual digital projects—many of which are rich in structured data and multimedia content or focused on generating content from the field “in real time,” and all of which demonstrate how the Web can and is being used to transform archaeological communications into forms that are more open, inclusive, and participatory. Above all, this volume aims to share these experiences to provide useful guidance for other researchers interested in applying technology to archaeology.
Posted in News.
Tagged with archaeology 2.0, book, publication.
By skansa
– December 2, 2011
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last week released two Requests for Information (RFI) that offer a great opportunity to weigh in on critical questions around access to the results of publicly-funded research. Read on and follow the links to contribute your two cents.
1. Public Access to Digital Data Resulting from Federally Funded Scientific Research. This RFI seeks “recommendations on approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and encouraging broad public access to unclassified digital data that result from federally funded scientific research.” Public input will inform the National Science and Technology Council’s Interagency Working Group on Digital Data, which in 2009 issued a report Harnessing the Power of Digital Data (available here) that recommended agencies lay the foundations for digital scientific data policy and make their policies publicly available. We have seen response to this report in the NSF’s January 2011 requirement of a Data Management Plan, and a similar move by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities in June 2011. This same working group is now seeking additional insight from “non-Federal stakeholders, including the public, universities, nonprofit and for-profit publishers, libraries, federally funded and non-federally funded research scientists, and other organizations and institutions with an interest in long-term stewardship and improved public access to the results of federally funded research.”
Responses to this RFI must be received by January 12, 2012. Check here for more details, including specific questions to consider, and information on how to respond to this RFI.
2. Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting from Federally Funded Research. This request solicits input on “approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded scientific research.” Public input will “inform deliberations of the National Science and Technology Council’s Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications.” Responses must be received by January 2, 2012. Check here for more details and information on how to respond to this RFI.
Posted in News.
Tagged with data dissemination, data management plan, policy.
By skansa
– November 5, 2011
The Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum will take place in Baltimore next week (October 31 – November 1). Eric Kansa will present a poster (1MB PDF) about developing a data journal for archaeology to help set, communicate, and maintain quality of datasets relevant to a given theme or discipline.
This represents a collaboration between the AAI/Open Context and the California Digital Library (CDL). AAI’s participation on the project is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and explores data publication workflows and issue-tracking. These are useful elements in data publication, since editorial workflows for data resemble software. Critical to this work was the establishment of an Open Context Editorial Board to develop guidelines and policies around data publication. Editorial guidelines are key to ensuring that data are useful to future researchers (more on this).
The CDL has already done groundbreaking work in the area of data journals. The collaboration between AAI/Open Context and the CDL brings together a data publisher with ties to practitioners and a strong, established data archiving infrastructure.
Read more on the AAI’s Data Journals project page. Follow the conference goings-on with Twitter using the hash tag #dlfforum.
Posted in Events, News.
Tagged with data journals, data pages, DLF Forum, poster.
By skansa
– October 27, 2011
A big thanks to the University of Arizona Libraries for their kind invitation to speak at their Open Access Week events. I joined Victoria Stodden who talked about reproducibility of research and Steve Koch who talked about integrating open science in instruction and his research activities (including a great example of collaboration mediated by YouTube, of all things).
Naturally I talked about Open Context, but also about how archaeology needs to cultivate a vibrant distributed information ecosystem. So much of my talk emphasized how we’re trying to make Open Context play a complementary and collaborative role with digital repositories (such as CDL and tDAR) and lots of other archaeological and humanistic data providers and projects (Pleiades, GAP, Nomisma, Pelagios, etc.). I ended with a discussion of how we’re exploring a model of data-sharing as publication and working to develop editorial processes to make this a reality. Those interested in more can check out the slides (6 MB PDF).
Posted in Events, News.
Tagged with open access, Open Access Week, open context, Open Data, Presentations.
By admin
– October 26, 2011
From AWOL:
The Walters Art Museum announced this week that it has removed copyright restrictions from more than 10,000 Images. Those images are now licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Collections at the Walters relating to antiquity include:
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is internationally renowned for its collection of art, which was amassed substantially by two men, William and Henry Walters, and eventually bequeathed to the City of Baltimore. The collection presents an overview of world art from pre-dynastic Egypt to 20th-century Europe, and counts among its many treasures Greek sculpture and Roman sarcophagi; medieval ivories and Old Master paintings; Art Deco jewelry and 19th-century European and American masterpieces.
Posted in News.
Tagged with Egypt, Greco-Roman, Israel/Palestine, Mesoamerican, Mesopotamia, museum, open access.
By Francis Deblauwe
– October 20, 2011
We’ve been working to develop a model of “data sharing as publication” in our work with Open Context. In our view, publication helps communicate some of the need for quality and standards alignment that makes effective data dissemination something more formal than implied by the term “sharing.”
We’re definitely not alone in this assessment, and other groups are also experimenting with various models of data publication. One group is the California Digital Library (CDL), a unit that runs many of the University of California’s leading scholarly communications and data preservation efforts.
The CDL recently began a project developing a platform to support a new kind of outlet for scientific data dissemination. They’re using the term “Data Journals” (see this link to a presentation introducing the idea) to describe this new outlet, since “journals” are a familiar and accepted part of researcher communications.
Like more conventional journals, a Data Journal would provide a disciplinary focus for data dissemination. In addition, because the CDL has expertise in the technical infrastructure of publication and data curation, a Data Journal would benefit from the same library curation, indexing, and search services that are so essential in conventional scholarly communications. That means we will be able to reliably track citations and impact of datasets, just as we can track such metrics for conventional publications.
This goal aligns very well with work we’re undertaking (with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation) to develop editorial workflows to improve data quality and align datasets with standards that may be expected in a given domain. Because of these converging and complementary goals, we’re joining with the CDL and will be piloting the development of a Data Journal for archaeology. The Data Journal will help communicate and set expectations about the nature and quality of data. It will also increase the future impact of datasets by adding relevance to them, increasing their discoverability, and contributing to their longevity. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we’re eager to develop the concept of a Data Journal because it will help make “data” a first class-citizen in the world of research communications.
Posted in News, Projects.
Tagged with data journals, data publishing, data sharing, digital libraries, Scholarly Communications.
By admin
– September 15, 2011
Open Context aims to make research data a valuable and valued aspect of scholarly communications, especially in archaeology. Its development is necessarily a long-term project because it requires inventing a host of new work-flows that can mesh with the realities of the professional lives of researchers.
Researchers face tremendous time pressures. This makes them generally unwilling to commit a great deal of time to activities that they consider to be 2nd or 3rd on the priority list. At the same time, many recognize that communicating primary data advances research, and many of the researchers with whom we collaborate want to be part of this “cutting edge.”
In our experience working with Open Context, we find plenty of researchers willing to openly publish their data. But to do so they need assistance on a variety of levels. Meaningful data sharing is hard. It takes time and effort to clean up datasets and improve data quality. It also takes time and effort to research and apply relevant standards that help make datasets more useful and intelligible (see our recent NEH/IMLS report).
Because of this effort and complexity, we believe the research community needs specialists with both information expertise and domain knowledge to assist in publishing primary data. To help improve the quality of Open Context’s data, we’re developing editorial work-flows for data publication. We’re pleased to announce Open Context’s new Editorial Board, a body of subject-matter experts who advise on data publication work-flows:
- Levant Atici (University of Nevada, Las Vegas): Paleolithic archaeology, zooarchaeology and taphonomy, foraging economies, the origins of animal domestication and the emergence of farming communities, the evolution of pastoral economies, the emergence of social complexity and state-level societies
- Harrison Eitteljorg, II (Bryn Mawr): Classical archaeology, architecture, computer applications in archaeology, archaeological data preservation
- Catherine P. Foster (MicroCommons and the Bade Museum): Ancient Near East, museums, households, microdebris analysis
- Sebastian Heath (ISAW / New York University): Classical archaeology, numismatics, ceramics, informatics, Linked Data
- Lori Jahnke (The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania): Biological anthropology, paleopathology, human variation, Andean bioarchaeology, medical and library informatics
- Morag Kersel (DePaul University): Ancient Near East, Aegean, cultural property and heritage law, museums, tourism
- Sannie Osborn (US Army Corps of Engineers): North American archaeology, historical archaeology, regulatory expertise, public archaeology
- Benjamin Porter (UC Berkeley): Islamic and Ancient Near East, agriculture, craft, semi-arid environments, community archaeology and development
- Yorke Rowan (University of Chicago): Lithics, survey, pre- and protohistory, eastern Mediterranean, religion, households
- Alexia Smith (University of Connecticut): Agriculture, agricultural development, palaeoethnobotany, climate change and landscape use, ecological anthropology; Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of the Near East
- Joshua Wells (Indiana University, South Bend): GIS, North American archaeology, Mississippian, archaeological informatics, education
Posted in Data publications, News, Projects, Uncategorized.
Tagged with data publication, data sharing, editorial board, people, Scholarly Communications, work flow.
By admin
– August 23, 2011
We’re delighted to announce that
Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration is now available via the University of California’s eScholarship repository, at the following link:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r6137tb
This book explores the social use and context of the World Wide Web within the discipline of archaeology. While the Web has radically altered journalism, commerce, media and social relationships, its sees very uneven adoption in professional scholarly contexts. Case studies discussed in this book help illuminate patterns of adoption and resistance to new forms of scholarly communication and data sharing. These case studies explore social media, digital preservation, and cultural representation concerns, as well as technical and semantic challenges and approaches toward data interoperability. Contributors to this volume debate the merits and sustainability of open access publishing and how the Web mediates interactions between professional and nonprofessional communities engaged in archaeology.
Archaeology 2.0 is the first book in the Cotsen Institute’s new Digital Archaeology Series (
http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=cioa_cda). The editors want to thank all of the book’s contributors, and also the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, especially Julie Nemer, Carol Leyba, and Willeke Wendrich. The printed version will be available for purchase shortly.
Posted in Uncategorized.
Tagged with archaeology, book, Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Data, Digital publication, open access, open context, Scholarly Communications, Web 2.0.
By admin
– August 18, 2011
