DataCite 2012 Summer Meeting - A short report

Title of this year DataCite 2012 Summer Meeting, in Copenhagen, is "DIGITAL RESEARCH DATA IN PRACTICE: solutions for improving discovery, access and use". Here some key messages from the event (for more see also tweets at: #datacite, #biosharing, #gigascience)

Chair: Lee-Ann Coleman, British Library
Keynote presentation: Jonathan Grant, President of RAND Europe,  
The science of science.

• The new science paradigm is based on the 4 As: Advocacy (make the case for research funding); Accountability (to taxpayers and donors); Analysis (what works in research), and Allocation (what to fund: institution, domains, people);
• We must move from advocacy to accountability and we need practical evidence for science policy 
• We must analyses what works also to speed things up: e.g., the time lag between spending on research and health gain is 17 years!
• Survey devised that works to capture the impacts that have arisen from research grant

Session 1: Discovery: It’s all about the metadata? Or is it? 

Chair: Jan Brase, TIB

Vishwas Chavan, GBIF, 
Towards next generation (data inclusive) publishing.

• The global, federated infrastructure for sharing biodiversity datasets has now over 327 million records;
• This community has embraced the concept of 'data papers' and over 70 are in the pipeline and will be published in 6 different (Pensoft) journals;
• But beyond datasets the need exists for creating persistent identifiers also for specimens, sequences, taxon names etc.;
• Data usage index is needed for publishers, datasets, thematic and country;
• More in "Data publishing framework for primary biodiversity data" a thematic review in BMC Bioinformatics (2011)

Andrew Treloar, ANDS, 

Seeking Serendipity: repurposing DataCite metadata to augment ANDS discovery.

• Data a a first-class object: from unstructured, disconnected, invisible, single use data to managed, connected, findable and reusable data;
• Research Data Australia supports creation or search of research datasets, collections, projects and organizations - gradually adding functionality.

Eefke Smit, STM Association, Data and Publications; and how they belong together.

• Deposition of datasets in archives continue to grow, surpassing journal articles in biomedical sciences;
• The data publication pyramid: 75% of research data is never made openly available, too many disciples still lacks community endorsed archive!
• STM and DataCite have just launched a new statement to: data must be deposited in trustworthy repositories; databases must also have links back to the publication(s); support for creation of best practices for citation of datasets; invitation to sign the statement (link to the statement soon; it was just signed live at this meeting by Eefke and Adam Farquhar, President, DataCite!)

Session 2: Access: understanding technical, legal or ethical barriers to access

Chair: Brigitte Hausstein, GESIS

Matthew Woollard, UKDA, 

Persistent identifiers in practice. The UK Data Archive's approach.

• The importance of recoding changes: approx 15% of the (social science) data collected is altered within the first year.

Michael Wilson, STFC,

Meeting a scientific facility provider's duty to maximise the value of data.

• Defends patents on innovation derived from science: this may require producing data sets over 20 years earlier!
• Capturing automatically the facility lifetimes (via the ICAT Metadata Catalogue): from submission of the proposals to the publication of the results;
• Currently DOIs are assigned at the higher entity, but not at data file (individual record) level, but it maybe needed soon;
• Even if only <1% if the data is commercialized, still unsolved remains the issue of what to publish data / how long the embargo should be;
• FP7 ENSURE project works to extend the state-of-the-art in digital preservation.

Sunje Dallmeier-Tiessen, CERN,

DataCite & INSPIRE: facilitating data preservation and reuse in High-Energy Physics. 

• In the High Energy Physics (HEP) projects, the discussion is about the levels of data description, and where it should be preserved, when associated to data publications;
• INSPIRE has 50k users and 1 million record in collaboration with the Durham HepData Project, in UK

Session 3: Different flavours of use

Chair: Herbert Gruttemeier, INIST

Scott Edmonds, GigaScience, BGI Shenzhen,

Adventures in Data Citation.

• Tackling the long tail of curation - democratization of big data; challenges with compliance to community standards; lack of standards interoperability across;
• GigaScience, a joint venture between BMC and BGI, with an associated data hosting platform: GigaDB;
• GigaScience issue 1 is due in in July 2012 - datasets description formatted in ISA-Tab;
• E. coli #crowdsourcing: the first tweetome!
• Data citation is still failing (e.g., Google Scholar does not takes 'data publication' in account) and should be improved;
• Minor quibbles: exports to citation managers: rules for versioning and to set granularity (e.g., citing papers vs micropublications).

Jean-François Perrin, ILL,

DOI usage: a large neutron facility.

• ILL raw data is available online since 1973, and released immediately after the experiment ends;
• But it is necessary to add experimental metadata that help in the interpretation of raw data file, also collecting it automatically, where possible, and link all to the publication;
• Pandata works to federate data infrastructure for synchrotron and neutron sources;
• Standardizing the format is the first step.

Susanna Sansone, University of Oxford,

The ISA Commons - experiences from the field; link to my presentation.

• Shared data have little or no value if they are not interpretable and, consequently, reusable; see the example provided by the work of Ioannidis et al., Nature Genetics, 2009;
• Say no to ‘data blobs', yes to verifiable, complete and structured information!
• Importance of capture all salient features of the experimental workflow, making the annotation explicit and discoverable: not too much, not too little, just 'right';
• Many community norms and standards: lack of coordination, fragmentation and uneven coverage - see list at BioSharing;
• ISA-Tab a general purpose experimental metadata tracking framework used by a growing number of communities in several biosciences domains, more in Sansone et al., Nature Genetics, 2012. 

Closing remarks – Adam Farquhar, President, DataCite.