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
Hi All,
A quick update. We’re in the middle of several new developments for Open Context. These mainly center on:
- Linked Open Data: For all the projects currently published in Open Context, we’re busy referencing some important shared vocabularies using Linked Open Data methods. Linking Open Context data to other relevant data on the Web is now part of publication workflow, and we’re looking forward to demonstrating this development.
- Large new datasets: We’re currently processing, cleaning, and linking (as in Linked Data) some very large datasets. With these published, we’ll more than double the size of Open Context’s overall collection.
- User interface and design improvements: We’re working with a professional designer and user-experience researcher to improve the user interactions and aesthetics. Expect to see some radical changes in Open Context’s look and feel in a few months.
Over the next few months, we’ll be incrementally rolling out these new developments. We’re especially excited about our work aligning Open Context with the wonderful world of Linked Open Data (see Wikipedia introduction). While we’ve been long aware of linked data approaches, we’ve been worried about work-flows on how to align data contributed by other researchers with concepts referenced from the public Web. We’ll make some important announcements about our efforts to enhance data publication workflows issue shortly.
Posted in News.
By admin
– August 15, 2011
We’re recovering this blog after a major server hardware failure. We’ll restore old content soon!
Posted in Uncategorized.
By admin
– May 25, 2011
The Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World (EHW) “is an original electronic project aiming at collecting, recording, documenting, presenting and promoting the historical data that testify to the presence of Hellenic [from ancient Greek till the Ottoman period] culture throughout time and space.” There are three main areas: Asia Minor, Black Sea and Constantinople.
EHW’s ultimate goal is to contribute to the understanding of how Hellenic culture was shaped and disseminated, taking under consideration its contacts and osmoses with other cultural realities and traditions. EHW’s entries cover the entire spectrum of the Hellenic life and activities and take advantage of the results of current research in relevant scientific fields. EHW draws information as well from archives and archaeological excavations. The electronic format of the EHW enables it to utilize fully the new digital technologies regarding the design of practical methods of integration, structuring and management of a considerable volume of textual and audiovisual material.
The EHW aims at the automatic creation of potential for the dynamic development of content, inter-disciplinary collaborations, educational and scientific virtual communities, the promotion of knowledge in scientific and educational issues and, finally, the provision of by-products of cultural/educational use and coherent thematic units of historical/cultural information to interested communities and institutions.
In its first stage the project’s structure is defined around the following units:
· Entries database, where the historical and cultural information is organized and presented in the form of encyclopedic entries that are accompanied by photographic documenting material.
· Audiovisual applications, where the information appearing in the entries is complemented with the visualization of historical events, processes and phenomena, three-dimensional representations, digital models of cities, music and video.
· Bibliographical database, which includes the complete bibliography of the entries and will be gradually updated, independently from the entries.
· Historical interactive atlas, where the spatial information is organized in the form of maps and is complemented with historical and audiovisual information.
Unfortunately, the latter part, the atlas, I cannot get to work properly. It does say that the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight is required and I took care of that. Still, it starts loading the map and a handy periods sidebar but then time and again it ends: “An error occured while communicating with the server.” Let’s hope this is nothing but a temporary glitch. Regarding archaeology, the focus is on the figurative arts and elite architecture rather than on the common-day material culture. Nice photos accompany the text entries. Some entries are just placeholders, to be completed in the future. Conclusion: a good resource that when fully completed will be very valuable.
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with archaeology, architecture, cultural heritage, database, Greece, site review.
By Francis Deblauwe
– December 21, 2010
