ODIN partners are heavily involved in the Open Repositories this year. We organize a panel discussion and a developers challenge, meaning that we do not only want to discuss and explain persistent identifiers, but also trigger some “hands-on” development on the latest DataCite and ORCID APIs. We hope to see you around!

But lets look at the details:

The dev challenge starts on Monday, the 9th of June. DataCite and ORCID technical staff will provide a technical walk-through to introduce developers to the current APIs. Technical staff will be on-hand throughout the days to answer questions and actively facilitate participant projects. This challenge is to use the open APIs provided by DataCite and ORCiD to build an application or service based on these persistent, shared, and open identifiers.

A non-exclusive list of possible areas on which to focus:
- Data author discovery or disambiguation
- Tracking institutional output
- Curation or collaboration tools
- Linking related research objects
- Tracking of citations or alternative metrics to data
- Allowing personal repositories to take advantage of ID systems

If you have an idea already, don’t hesitate to contact us and share it!

As an appetizer for the challenge, we organize a webinar where you can learn about the latest tech details ahead of time. It will take place the 3rd of June and you can find all the details here!

The panel discussion is on Thursday 12th

The panelists will discuss projects underway to test the use of shared persistent identifiers to support interoperability between research systems, how such interoperability affects data sharing and citation, and how it can serve as a springboard for new services. Speakers from ORCID and DataCite will discuss implementation challenges for persistent identifier registries, including community engagement and support for development of third-party services. Dryad and CERN will focus on the challenges and opportunities for integrating shared persistent identifiers.

The discussion will focus on the challenges ahead of use: While substantial progress has been made, there are still steps to take, including disciplinary requirements and engagement of the researchers themselves in using the identifiers and data-sharing tools. One demanding domain is data publication, which involves new forms of citation, questions on how authorship should be treated, and lack of standards for crediting researchers who share their data.

By the way, if you are interested in us, the ODIN’s partners, this is the unique opportunity to meet most of us in person. Our colleagues even come from Australia. So, drop us an email if you want to share a drink!

For any further details, visit our OR14 section.

Research data has been the main focus of data intensive scientific discovery for more than a decade; however, these days it has a wider audience both in scholarly community and public sector. Research data is transforming to be a first class outcome of research, and a key enabler for research collaboration.

The third plenary of Research Data Alliance (RDA) in Dublin (March 2014) was a good demonstration of raising the international interest in research data. More than four hundred researchers and policy makers got together to talk about the future of research data and data infrastructure.

Researchers are interested to…

• discover datasets related to their research,

• enable other researchers to discover their datasets and develop new collaborations,

• identify high impact datasets (highly cited or the result of major research funding), and

• find where their data has been reused in scholarly work.

While funding agencies and university administrators are keen to…

• discover the impact of their investment in research and research data, and

• identify the opportunities for research collaboration where their investment in research data can lead to new collaborative research and innovation.

Given the strong interest in discovery of research data among RDA members, interoperability was a key topic of discussion in many RDA groups, and DataCite and ORCID played an important role in these discussions. While DateCite is providing unique identifiers for datasets, ORCID enables the researchers to link these identifiers to their author identifiers, creating an open and transparent connection between researchers and their research outcome.

The interoperability between ORCID and DataCite is essential to build a fabric of collaboration among research capabilities, and ODIN is the manifestation of this collaboration. It is apparent that ODIN outcome can be adopted with many RDA communities; hence it is important for ODIN members to continue communication of ODIN achievements with the RDA groups, and share the lessons learnt from this project.

Many of our partners are present at the Research Data Alliance Third Plenary (RDA) that happens right now in Dublin. We also announced our final event, which will take place right after the fourth RDA plenary in September in Amsterdam.  

ODIN’s Final Event, 24th September 2014

If you are around, come and see the ODIN poster. Artemis Lavasa charted a data management workflow within a digital library in High-Energy Physics. We are currently working on comparing this with Humanities and Social Sciences and many other disciplines. We pay particular attention to persistent identifiers and their role during the process. 

If you have similar experiences in your discipline, feel free to mail us and share your workflows. We are happy to include as many points of view as possible.

In any case, stay tuned for our reports that are due this summer!

See you at RDA!

One of the things we’ve discovered from talking with data-centres is that for many datasets they have scant author metadata, with little more that an institution name attributed. They’ve love the ability to pull claims information out of ORCiD and use it to selectively enrich their own metadata, thus completing a “virtuous circle” of integration. They’re also very interested in usage statistics and tracking the penetration of ORCiD within their own user-base.

Until now it’s been difficult for data-centres to access this information - it required coding against the ORCiD search API. Until recent changes in the ORCiD API, if the data-centre was using non-DOI identifiers then it was not just hard to do, but impossible. With that in mind, we’ve developed a tool that makes it really easy for them to do so using a simple interface, without having to implement any code.

The tool was initially developed to work with one of the ODIN partners data services, EThOS, and forms part of the same application. It’s freely accessible on the web and the code is open source. The underlying interactions with ORCiD are managed by a separate open source library that was also developed by an ODIN partner.

The tool can be found at http://ethos-orcid-appspot.com/search and the source code at https://github.com/TomDemeranville/orcid-update-java

Tom

Over on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, Rachael Kotarski writes about various aspects of data citation:

As part of the Opportunities for Data Exchange (ODE) project, we investigated data citation and the ways in which data centres, publishers, libraries and researchers can encourage better data citation. What does ‘better data citation’ look like and how do we encourage it to happen? We examined three aspects of current practice in order to answer this question:

How data is cited?
What data is cited?
Where is data cited within the article?

Read the rest of the post
 

Continue reading →

We have just released several project deliverables. As usual, all documents are published on Figshare, each assigned a DOI and linked to from our project outputs page.