AHRQ Public Access to Federally Funded Research

AHRQ Public Access to Federally Funded Research. Francis D. Chesley. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. February, 2015.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's  has established a policy for public access to scientific publications and scientific data in digital format resulting from funding through the agency. Preservation is one of the Public Access Policy's primary objectives.

The Public Access Policy includes the following objectives:

• Ensure that the public can access the final published digital documents.
• Facilitate easy public search, analysis of and access to these publications
• Ensure the attributes to authors, journals, and original publishers are maintained.
• Ensure that publications and metadata are in an archival solution.
• Ensure that all researchers receiving grants develop data management plans, describing how they will provide for long-term preservation of and access to scientific data in digital format.

Data management plans will include:

• A plan for protecting confidentiality and personal privacy.
• A description of how scientific data in digital format will be shared
• It must include a plan for long-term preservation and access to the data

The data management plans will be evaluated based on the values of long-term preservation, access, and the associated cost, and administrative burden. AHRQ will contract with a commercial repository to ensure long-term preservation and full access to the public.

Digital scientific data is defined as "the digital recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings including data sets used to support scholarly publications, but does not include laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer reviews, communications with colleagues, or physical objects, such as laboratory specimens."

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Dataverse Network

The Dataverse Network. Harvard Dataverse Network. 2014.
The Dataverse Network is an open source application to publish, share, reference, extract and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others and to replicate work of other researchers. The network hosts multiple studies or collections of studies, and each study contains cataloging information that describes the data plus the actual data and complementary files.

The Dataverse Network project develops software, protocols, and community connections for creating research data repositories that automate professional archival practices, guarantee long term preservation, and enable researchers to share, retain control of, and receive web visibility and formal academic citations for their data contributions.

Digital Preservation Matters.

A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images

A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images. Google Research Blob. November 17, 2014. 
Google has developed a machine-learning system that can automatically produce captions to accurately describe images the first time it sees them. It can describe a complex scene which requires a deeper representation of what’s going on in the scene, capturing how the various objects relate to one another and translating it all into natural-sounding language. The full paper "Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator" is here.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The age of data: Strategies for response

The age of data: Strategies for response. John W. Thompson. Computerworld. June 14, 2013.
The scale of data growth today is so massive it can be numbing. A recent study shows that "in the last minute there were 204 million emails sent, 61,000 hours of music listened to on Pandora, 20 million photo views and 3 million uploads to Flickr, 100,000 tweets, 6 million views and 277,000 Facebook logins, and 2 million plus Google searches." Data is continuing to grow at a phenomenal pace. The total of all digital data created and replicated will reach 4 zettabytes in 2013, almost 50 percent more than 2012. The growth of data also provides an opportunity for organizations to analyze the information being gathered and use it to its advantage. One of the things that has helped is the technology to reduce the amount of data by managing it and eliminate dozens and dozens of redundant copies. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Stakeholder Benefits from Research Data Management: new document from Research360 project.

Stakeholder Benefits from Research Data Management: new document from Research360 project. Neil Beagrie, Catherine Pink. University of Bath.  26 Nov 2012.
The Research360 Project has released the summary stakeholder benefits analysis from the Research Data Management business case for the University of Bath. The 4 page document is available for  download in PDF format.

Industry and private sector partnerships alongside public sector and voluntary sector partnerships are key elements of many university research programmes.  Frequently partners sharing their practice, results data and laboratory methodologies can lead to vital knowledge transfer activities, improved services and products, creation of spin-out companies and further investment in the Higher Education sector.  A summary list of stakeholder benefits that can arise from research data management in these collaborations. Benefits are listed for:

• university community by its key stakeholder groups:
• academic staff and researchers, students, professional services, and the institution
• external partners:
• industry and commerce, public/voluntary sectors, government, and society 

 Some of the benefits include:

• Improve possibility of success in research funding by addressing any concerns around data management.
• Safeguarding your data against potential loss.
• Support in patent issues such as proof of provenance through improved use of version control.
• Enhanced global reputation through recognition of the quality of research outputs and data infrastructure.
• Attract new collaborators and accelerate deepening of existing relationships.
• Graduate employability increased through university partner connections and student data skills.
• Reduction of risk for sensitive data if data transfer is secure.
• Cost efficiencies from shared data services.

Digital Preservation Matters.