A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

UKOLN is supported by:

Curating the Scientific Record: The Challenges Ahead

Dr Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN

Associate Director, UK Digital Curation Centre

NERC Data Management Workshop, October 2007.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons LicenceAttribution-ShareAlike 2.0

Overview

1. Open science: trends and drivers.

2. Preservation and curation choices for the scientist.

3. Implications & challenges for NERC?

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Open science: trends and drivers

?

Open data: in the public domain….

Data usability: presentation and visualisation

Sharing data: Uploads and Ratings….

?

Social networks for scientists

“Big science”: data services beyond the discipline:multi-disciplinaryand public

At the coalface: tagging & sharing workflows Astronomy, Bioinformatics, Chemistry, Social Science pilots.

Universities of Manchester & Southampton

“Small science”: chemistry exemplar

Dr Cameron Neylon, STFC / Univ. Soton

“Open Notebook Science” - Jean-Claude Bradley, Drexel Univ.

New cohorts of postgraduates: millennials / Google generation

Social networks mediating data-sharing

User feeds or scraping data from your hard disk….

How far can this go?

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Preservation & curation choices for the scientist

8 Preservation / Curation choices?

1. Disciplinary data centre2. Institutional / departmental / lab repository 3. Repository federation or network4. Public repository5. Web archiving service6. Commercial data store - Amazon S3 service7. Ecosystem of hosted lifebits services (Jon Udell) 8. None of these?

Disciplinary model?

Institutional model?

Crystallography repositories at the University of Southampton

CreateDeposit

Link

Curate Preserve Standards

Scientist

Funder

Collaborate Share

User

Discover Re-use

eCrystals Federation Data Deposit Model

Link

Link

Scientist

Policy AdvocacyTraining

HarvestIR Federation

Publishers

Data centres / aggregator

servicesAdvisory

Web archiving services

Commercial data store?

Microsoft Research SenseCam :

life-logging

Gordon Bell, Microsoft Research, MyLifeBits ProjectHosted lifebits service

for datacasts?

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Implications & Challenges for NERC?

UKOLN Liz Lyon June 2007 35 Recs for JISC

Roles, Rights, Responsibilities,

Relationships: scientist, institution, data centre, user, funder, publisher

RIN April 2007

5 Principles: Roles & responsibilities, standards & QA, access, usage & credit, benefits & cost-effectiveness, preservation & sustainability

Strategic approaches & policy

What does this mean for NERC?

Data Strategy, Policy & Practice• “Strategic co-ordination with other research funding

organisations: joint strategy development”• What is the NERC position on open science?• Is NERC-funded data published on scientific social

networks?• What is NERC policy on data sharing using social networks?• Do data centres link to open data sources elsewhere? • How are science social networks embedded in the end-to-

end workflow and data capture?• Barriers? Resistance to change? NERC Culture?

“Evaluate re-purposing of datasets”: how much NERC data is re-used?

“Identify the significant properties which facilitate re-use?”

ROI implications

Data re-use

Sustainability and planning• “Commission a cost-benefit study of data curation &

preservation infrastructure”• JISC Study on Research data preservation costs (by Feb

2008)• RIN study on Economics in the life-cycle of scholarly

communications (Aug07-Jan08)• NSF / Mellon Blue Ribbon Task Force on economic

sustainability of digital preservation Co-chairs, Fran Berman (SDSC) & Brian Lavoie (OCLC) over 2 years

• NERC investment in data infrastructure should be linked to programme planning ? 5 year horizon ?

Advocacy, Training and Skills

• “Messages need to be clear and consistent” • NERC advocacy programmes?• The researcher has some curatorial responsibility• “A study is needed to examine the role & career

development of data scientists”• NERC responsibility for training, skills and professional

development• Community proxy role of the data curator?• Enhance data handling skills within the under-graduate

curriculum• Millennials as native data scientists?

• NERC partnerships: working with the DCC

• SCARP project addressing disciplinary requirements

• Data Centres Forum: exchange of experience

• Advocacy programmes targeted at disciplines

• Co-ordinating training to build workforce capacity

• New science, new knowledge: data is the key

Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/

                                                             

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Questions?

Slides will be available at :

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/presentations.html