Financial New for Everyone

An investigation into how patient outcomes are assessed in clinical trials has revealed a worrying lack of consistency, raising concerns about funding being wasted on the acquisition of poor quality data.

The paper explains the approach taken in the UK Jisc-funded RDMRose project to developing a study module/Open Educational Resource about Research Data Management (RDM) for librarians. The resource was developed collaboratively between the University of Sheffield Information School and the libraries at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York. Curriculum design principles such as an emphasis on exploring the nature of research and on other professional services supporting RDM were based on requirements gathered from focus groups and the literature. The content of the eight half-day sessions is briefly outlined. The paper goes on to explore how the learning materials were evaluated by this first cohort of learners and readjusted to respond to feedback. Future plans for co-producing an RDM related learning resource through a student-centered process and to create a sustainable learning network are discussed.

From time to time, co-chairs of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Arts and Humanities Content Working Group will bring you guest posts addressing the future of research and development for digital cultural heritage as a follow-up to a dynamic forum held at the 2014 Digital Preservation Conference.   The following is a guest post from Meg […]

Sync is NOT BACKUP (necessarily).

Digital technologies carry the promise of transforming science and opening up the research process. We interviewed researchers from a variety of backgrounds about their attitudes towards and experiences with openness in their research practices. We observe a considerable discrepancy between the concept of open science and scholarly reality. While many researchers support open science in theory, the individual researcher is confronted with various difficulties when putting open science into practice. We analyse the major obstacles to open science and group them into two main categories: individual obstacles and systemic obstacles. We argue that the phenomenon of open science can be seen through the prism of a social dilemma: what is in the collective best interest of the scientific community is not necessarily in the best interest of the individual scientist. We discuss the possibilities of transferring theoretical solutions to social dilemma problems to the realm of open science.

The following is a guest post from Jane Mandelbaum, co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working group and IT Project Manager at the Library of Congress. As part of our ongoing series of Insights interviews with individuals doing innovative work related to digital preservation and stewardship, we are interested in talking to practitioners from other […]

Part of NDSA "Checking Your Digital Content" series.

The participating companies are publicly committing themselves not to sell information on kindergartners through 12th graders.

Understanding the header (metadata block) of a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) document as it relates to digital libraries and publishing

We're taking a closer look at the way we do research.

Flowchart for new-service yea/nay decisions.

This year has seen a number of sexual assault and domestic violence issues make the headlines. Of course, the National Football League and the accusations that it covered up, or at least diminished awareness of and penalties for, widespread domestic violence continue to garner media attention....

Over the last decade, there have been significant changes in data sharing policies and in the data sharing environment faced by life science researchers. Using data from a 2013 survey of over 1600 life science researchers, we analyze the effects of sharing policies of funding agencies and journals. We also examine the effects of new sharing infrastructure and tools (i.e., third party repositories and online supplements). We find that recently enacted data sharing policies and new sharing infrastructure and tools have had a sizable effect on encouraging data sharing. In particular, third party repositories and online supplements as well as data sharing requirements of funding agencies, particularly the NIH and the National Human Genome Research Institute, were perceived by scientists to have had a large effect on facilitating data sharing. In addition, we found a high degree of compliance with these new policies, although noncompliance resulted in few formal or informal sanctions. Despite the overall effectiveness of data sharing policies, some significant gaps remain: about one third of grant reviewers placed no weight on data sharing plans in their reviews, and a similar percentage ignored the requirements of material transfer agreements. These patterns suggest that although most of these new policies have been effective, there is still room for policy improvement.

We’re increasingly frustrated and disappointed by service. Customers, employees, owners–no one wants to deliver bad service, and no one wants to endure it. But that’s the experience we continue to inflict on each other. Why is that?

Am I the only person who finds this absolutely horrifying?