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Scientific Data Management: Caring for Your Institution and its Intellectual Wealth

Virtual Conference

About the Virtual Conference

In spite of the fact that it is produced daily and is the underlying support for scholarly journal articles, research data has been one of the least managed content resources. This neglect is fast coming to an end, as many funding organizations now require that researchers plan for the organization, care, and sharing of the data produced as part of a funded project. Libraries have a significant opportunity to take on a new role in their institution's data management. The same expertise used in managing traditional print and electronic library resources can be applied to data management planning and curation. But while there are many similarities in managing data, there are also important differences that need to be addressed.

This NISO virtual conference will explore many current and up-and-coming aspects of research data management, including:

  • Data management practice meets policy
  • Uses for the data management plan
  • Building data management capacity and functionality
  • Citing and curating datasets
  • Connecting datasets with other products of scholarship
  • Changing researchers’ practices
  • Teaching data management techniques

NEW! All registrants to this virtual conference will receive a login to the associated Training Thursday on Crafting a Scientific Data Management Plan to be held on February 26. (Separate registration to the training event only is also available.)  If you are unable to attend the Training Thursday in person, you can view the recording of the session.

Event Sessions

Introduction

Speaker

11:00 a.m. – 11:10 a.m

Keynote Address: Data Management Plan Requirements at the US Department of Energy

Speaker

Laura Biven

Ph.D., Senior Science and Technology Advisor, Office of the Deputy Director for Science Programs, Office of Science
US Department of Energy

11:10 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science published its “Statement on Digital Data Management” in the summer of 2014 and began requiring Data Management Plans with research proposals in FY 2015. Other DOE research offices will have similar requirements for FY 2016. This presentation will discuss the history, philosophy, and details of the Data Management Plan requirements and potential future activities.

Learning to Curate Research Data

Speaker

Jennifer Doty

Research Data Librarian
Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Robert W. Woodruff Library

12:00 p.m. - 12:30 p.m.

As many libraries and institutions ramp up their efforts to support research data management, and look for ways to capitalize on strong relationships with their faculty and student researchers, collaborations with established data archives provide an opportunity to improve the quantity and quality of data being preserved and shared. This presentation will discuss the experience of one institution’s partnership with a domain specific data archive, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), to receive 1) training while curating a locally produced research dataset through their pipeline of internal workflows and tools, and 2) hosting instructors locally for a data curation workshop series aimed at researchers and librarians.

 

Building Best Practices in Research Data Management: Tisch Library’s Initiatives

Speaker

Regina Raboin

Science Research and Instruction Librarian/ Data Management Services Group Coordinator
Tisch Library, Tufts University

12:30 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

A look at Tisch Library’s Research Data Management Group suite of research data management services through the forging of relationships across the university; use of [the] New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum (NECDMC, led by the Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School) to teach data management best practices; Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) project; and data management plans consultation services and support.

Lunch Break

1:00 p.m. - 1:35 p.m. 

Preview of February 26 Training Thursday

Speaker

1:35 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.

Jennifer Thoegersen, Data Curation Librarian, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, will give a high-level preview of the February 26 Training Thursday, Crafting a Scientific Data Management Plan. This session is free to registrants of the virtual conference and hopes to provide attendees with the tools they need to implement plans at their institutions. 

Using data management plans as a research tool: an introduction to the DART Project

Speaker

Amanda Whitmire

Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Data Management Specialist
Oregon State University Libraries & Press

1:45 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.

Data management plans (DMPs) are a rich source of information about researchers and their research data management (RDM) knowledge, capabilities, and practices. Systematic analysis of DMPs can uncover important insights about local RDM needs, which can then inform the development or expansion of library RDM services. As part of an Institute of Museum and Library Services project, we (co-PIs at 5 research-intensive universities) have developed a rubric for the assessment of NSF DMPs. The tool is intended to facilitate and standardize the review of DMPs, and highlight gaps in proposed RDM practices that could be addressed through data services support. The main audience for the rubric is academic data services librarians, but it could be used by anyone who needs to review a DMP. In this presentation, I’ll briefly review the development of the rubric, and then share some results from an initial inter-rater comparison of 25 data management plans.

Capacity Building: Leveraging existing library networks to take on research data

Speaker

Heidi Imker

Director of the Research Data Service
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2:15 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. 

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University Library is developing a Library Research Data Network to provide a structured approach to taming the data landscape. By connecting the existing interests, expertise, and campus relationships of Librarians with the newly established Research Data Service, we'll form discrete teams to monitor and evaluate resources and actively reach out to campus researchers to solicit and encourage appropriate data publication. Although in the early planning stages now, we hope interest will grow and our reach will expand through development of a well-coordinated, action-oriented, and reward-driven Library Research Data Network.

Afternoon Break

2:45 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Enabling transparency and efficiency in the research landscape

Speaker

Melissa Haendel

Associate Professor
Ontology Development Group, OHSU Library, Department of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University

3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Force11 is a grass-roots community (https://www.force11.org/) that developed out of the beyond-the-pdf conferences, which has the goal to change the way we perform scholarly communication. How can we make our communications more transparent? How can the data be made more available and more reusable? How can we cite data as a scholarly product itself? How can we attribute different types of contributions within the research landscape? What differences in communication and value systems across disciplines and cultures? How do we support a "born digital" research process? Discovering the answers to these questions are the goals of the Force11 community and its working groups. This presentation will focus on efforts to represent attribution for a variety of contributions to research, how to support reproducible research, and various other Force11 activities.

Improving Integrity, Transparency, and Reproducibility Through Connection of the Scholarly Workflow

Speaker

Andrew Sallans

Partnerships, Collaborations, and Funding
Center for Open Science

3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

The Center for Open Science (COS) was founded as a non-profit technology start-up in 2013 with the goal of improving transparency and reproducibility by connecting the scholarly workflow. COS achieves this goal through the development of a free, open source web application called the Open Science Framework (OSF), providing features like file sharing and citing, persistent urls, provenance tracking, and automated versioning. Initial workflow API connections focused on storage services and included Figshare, GitHub, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and Dataverse. This session will introduce the core architecture and the problems that it solves, and illustrate how connecting services can benefit everyone involved in supporting the research ecosystem. COS is funded through the generosity of grants from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Association of Research Libraries, and others.

Network Effects: RMap Project

Speaker

4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

RMap is a two-year project, generously supported by a $602,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This grant came out of conversations that began over two years ago between the Data Conservancy at Johns Hopkins University, Portico, and IEEE. Those conversations were motivated by the recognition that the “atomic unit” of scholarly communication increasingly is now a complex distributed object, consisting of distinct building blocks, including text, graphics, and data, which often reside in different repositories, and are maintained by different institutions, employing different technologies. Further, not only does the scholarly community require preservation of publications and data and the other artifacts of scholarly research -- it also requires the preservation of the relationships among them. The RMap project will provide a framework and tools to define and represent these connections among cited and uncited data, publications, and other artifacts of scholarly research and communications, in a graph-based view that captures many-to-many relationships amongst those objects, the scholars and researchers who create them, funders, institutions, and repositories. It will provide a framework to preserve the articulation of those connections.

Roundtable Discussion

Speaker

4:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. 
Moderated by: Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO

Additional Information

  • Cancellations made by Wednesday, February 11, 2015 will receive a refund, less a $35 cancellation. After that date, there are no refunds.

  • Registrants will receive detailed instructions about accessing the virtual conference via e-mail the Friday prior to the event. (Anyone registering between Monday and the close of registration will receive the message shortly after the registration is received, within normal business hours.) Due to the widespread use of spam blockers, filters, out of office messages, etc., it is your responsibility to contact the NISO office if you do not receive login instructions before the start of the webinar.

  • If you have not received your Login Instruction email by 10AM (ET) on the Tuesday before the webinar, please contact the NISO office or email Juliana Wood, Educational Programs Manager at jwood@niso.org for immediate assistance.

  • Registration is per site (access for one computer) and includes access to the online recorded archive of the conference. You may have as many people as you like from the registrant's organization view the conference from that one connection. If you need additional connections, you will need to enter a separate registration for each connection needed.

  • If you are registering someone else from your organization, either use that person's e-mail address when registering or contact Juliana Wood to provide alternate contact information.

  • Conference presentation slides and Q&A will be posted to this event webpage following the live conference.

  • Registrants will receive an e-mail message containing access information to the archived conference recording within 48 hours after the event. This recording access is only to be used by the registrant's organization.