scholarly journals GO FAIR Brazil: A Challenge for Brazilian Data Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 238-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luana Sales ◽  
Patrícia Henning ◽  
Viviane Veiga ◽  
Maira Murrieta Costa ◽  
Luís Fernando Sayão ◽  
...  

The FAIR principles, an acronym for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, are recognised worldwide as key elements for good practice in all data management processes. To understand how the Brazilian scientific community is adhering to these principles, this article reports Brazilian adherence to the GO FAIR initiative through the creation of the GO FAIR Brazil Office and the manner in which they create their implementation networks. To contextualise this understanding, we provide a brief presentation of open data policies in Brazilian research and government, and finally, we describe a model that has been adopted for the GO FAIR Brazil implementation networks. The Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology is responsible for the GO FAIR Brazil Office, which operates in all fields of knowledge and supports thematic implementation networks. Today, GO FAIR Brazil-Health is the first active implementation network in operation, which works in all health domains, serving as a model for other fields like agriculture, nuclear energy, and digital humanities, which are in the process of adherence negotiation. This report demonstrates the strong interest and effort from the Brazilian scientific communities in implementing the FAIR principles in their research data management practices.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Steinbeck ◽  
Oliver Koepler ◽  
Felix Bach ◽  
Sonja Herres-Pawlis ◽  
Nicole Jung ◽  
...  

The vision of NFDI4Chem is the digitalisation of all key steps in chemical research to support scientists in their efforts to collect, store, process, analyse, disclose and re-use research data. Measures to promote Open Science and Research Data Management (RDM) in agreement with the FAIR data principles are fundamental aims of NFDI4Chem to serve the chemistry community with a holistic concept for access to research data. To this end, the overarching objective is the development and maintenance of a national research data infrastructure for the research domain of chemistry in Germany, and to enable innovative and easy to use services and novel scientific approaches based on re-use of research data. NFDI4Chem intends to represent all disciplines of chemistry in academia. We aim to collaborate closely with thematically related consortia. In the initial phase, NFDI4Chem focuses on data related to molecules and reactions including data for their experimental and theoretical characterisation. This overarching goal is achieved by working towards a number of key objectives: Key Objective 1: Establish a virtual environment of federated repositories for storing, disclosing, searching and re-using research data across distributed data sources. Connect existing data repositories and, based on a requirements analysis, establish domain-specific research data repositories for the national research community, and link them to international repositories. Key Objective 2: Initiate international community processes to establish minimum information (MI) standards for data and machine-readable metadata as well as open data standards in key areas of chemistry. Identify and recommend open data standards in key areas of chemistry, in order to support the FAIR principles for research data. Finally, develop standards, if there is a lack. Key Objective 3: Foster cultural and digital change towards Smart Laboratory Environments by promoting the use of digital tools in all stages of research and promote subsequent Research Data Management (RDM) at all levels of academia, beginning in undergraduate studies curricula. Key Objective 4: Engage with the chemistry community in Germany through a wide range of measures to create awareness for and foster the adoption of FAIR data management. Initiate processes to integrate RDM and data science into curricula. Offer a wide range of training opportunities for researchers. Key Objective 5: Explore synergies with other consortia and promote cross-cutting development within the NFDI. Key Objective 6: Provide a legally reliable framework of policies and guidelines for FAIR and open RDM.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Jeng ◽  
Liz Lyon

We report on a case study which examines the social science community’s capability and institutional support for data management. Fourteen researchers were invited for an in-depth qualitative survey between June 2014 and October 2015. We modify and adopt the Community Capability Model Framework (CCMF) profile tool to ask these scholars to self-assess their current data practices and whether their academic environment provides enough supportive infrastructure for data related activities. The exemplar disciplines in this report include anthropology, political sciences, and library and information science. Our findings deepen our understanding of social disciplines and identify capabilities that are well developed and those that are poorly developed. The participants reported that their institutions have made relatively slow progress on economic supports and data science training courses, but acknowledged that they are well informed and trained for participants’ privacy protection. The result confirms a prior observation from previous literature that social scientists are concerned with ethical perspectives but lack technical training and support. The results also demonstrate intra- and inter-disciplinary commonalities and differences in researcher perceptions of data-intensive capability, and highlight potential opportunities for the development and delivery of new and impactful research data management support services to social sciences researchers and faculty. 


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Hagen Peukert

After a century of theorising and applying management practices, we are in the middle of entering a new stage in management science: digital management. The management of digital data submerges in traditional functions of management and, at the same time, continues to recreate viable solutions and conceptualisations in its established fields, e.g. research data management. Yet, one can observe bilateral synergies and mutual enrichment of traditional and data management practices in all fields. The paper at hand addresses a case in point, in which new and old management practices amalgamate to meet a steadily, in part characterised by leaps and bounds, increasing demand of data curation services in academic institutions. The idea of modularisation, as known from software engineering, is applied to data curation workflows so that economies of scale and scope can be used. While scaling refers to both management science and data science, optimising is understood in the traditional managerial sense, that is, with respect to the cost function. By means of a situation analysis describing how data curation services were applied from one department to the entire institution and an analysis of the factors of influence, a method of modularisation is outlined that converges to an optimal state of curation workflows.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neha Makhija ◽  
Mansi Jain ◽  
Nikolaos Tziavelis ◽  
Laura Di Rocco ◽  
Sara Di Bartolomeo ◽  
...  

Data lakes are an emerging storage paradigm that promotes data availability over integration. A prime example are repositories of Open Data which show great promise for transparent data science. Due to the lack of proper integration, Data Lakes may not have a common consistent schema and traditional data management techniques fall short with these repositories. Much recent research has tried to address the new challenges associated with these data lakes. Researchers in this area are mainly interested in the structural properties of the data for developing new algorithms, yet typical Open Data portals offer limited functionality in that respect and instead focus on data semantics.We propose Loch Prospector, a visualization to assist data management researchers in exploring and understanding the most crucial structural aspects of Open Data — in particular, metadata attributes — and the associated task abstraction for their work. Our visualization enables researchers to navigate the contents of data lakes effectively and easily accomplish what were previously laborious tasks. A copy of this paper with all supplemental material is available at osf.io/zkxv9


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Fremand

<p>Open data is not a new concept. Over sixty years ago in 1959, knowledge sharing was at the heart of the Antarctic Treaty which included in article III 1c the statement: “scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available”. ​At a similar time, the World Data Centre (WDC) system was created to manage and distribute the data collected from the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) led by the International Council of Science (ICSU) building the foundations of today’s research data management practices.</p><p>What about now? The WDC system still exists through the World Data System (WDS). Open data has been endorsed by a majority of funders and stakeholders. Technology has dramatically evolved. And the profession of data manager/curator has emerged. Utilising their professional expertise means that their role is far wider than the long-term curation and publication of data sets.</p><p>Data managers are involved in all stages of the data life cycle: from data management planning, data accessioning to data publication and re-use. They implement open data policies; help write data management plans and provide advice on how to manage data during, and beyond the life of, a science project. In liaison with software developers as well as scientists, they are developing new strategies to publish data either via data catalogues, via more sophisticated map-based viewer services or in machine-readable form via APIs. Often, they bring the expertise of the field they are working in to better assist scientists satisfy Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) principles. Recent years have seen the development of a large community of experts that are essential to share, discuss and set new standards and procedures. The data are published to be re-used, and data managers are key to promoting high-quality datasets and participation in large data compilations.</p><p>To date, there is no magical formula for FAIR data. The Research Data Alliance is a great platform allowing data managers and researchers to work together, develop and adopt infrastructure that promotes data-sharing and data-driven research. However, the challenge to properly describe each data set remains. Today, scientists are expecting more and more from their data publication or data requests: they want interactive maps, they want more complex data systems, they want to query data, combine data from different sources and publish them rapidly.  By developing new procedures and standards, and looking at new technologies, data managers help set the foundations to data science.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-170
Author(s):  
Jennifer Kaari

A Review of: Elsayed, A. M., & Saleh, E. I. (2018). Research data management and sharing among researchers in Arab universities: An exploratory study. IFLA Journal, 44(4), 281–299. https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035218785196 Abstract Objective – To investigate researchers’ practices and attitudes regarding research data management and data sharing. Design – Email survey. Setting – Universities in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Subjects – Surveys were sent to 4,086 academic faculty researchers. Methods – The survey was emailed to faculty at three Arab universities, targeting faculty in the life sciences and engineering. The survey was created using Google Docs and remained open for five months. Participants were asked basic demographic questions, questions regarding their research data and metadata practices, and questions regarding their data sharing practices. Main Results – The authors received 337 responses, for a response rate of 8%. The results showed that 48.4% of respondents had a data management plan and that 97% were responsible for preserving their own data. Most respondents stored their research data on their personal storage devices. The authors found that 64.4% of respondents reported sharing their research data. Respondents most frequently shared their data by publishing in a data research journal, sharing through academic social networks such as ResearchGate, and providing data upon request to peers. Only 5.1% of respondents shared data through an open data repository.  Of those who did not share data, data privacy and confidentiality were the most common reasons cited. Of the respondents who did share their data, contributing to scientific progress and increased citation and visibility were the primary reasons for doing so. A total of 59.6% of respondents stated that they needed more training in research data management from their universities. Conclusion – The authors conclude that researchers at Arab universities are still primarily responsible for their own data and that data management planning is still a new concept to most researchers. For the most part, the researchers had a positive attitude toward data sharing, although depositing data in open repositories is still not a widespread practice. The authors conclude that in order to encourage strong data management practices and open data sharing among Arab university researchers, more training and institutional support is needed.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara L Wilson ◽  
Micah Altman ◽  
Rafael Jaramillo

Data stewardship in experimental materials science is increasingly complex and important. Progress in data science and inverse-design of materials give reason for optimism that advances can be made if appropriate data resources are made available. Data stewardship also plays a critical role in maintaining broad support for research in the face of well-publicized replication failures (in different fields) and frequently changing attitudes, norms, and sponsor requirements for open science. The present-day data management practices and attitudes in materials science are not well understood. In this article, we collect information on the practices of a selection of materials scientists at two leading universities, using a semi-structured interview instrument. An analysis of these interviews reveals that although data management is universally seen as important, data management practices vary widely. Based on this analysis, we conjecture that broad adoption of basic file-level data sharing at the time of manuscript submission would benefit the field without imposing substantial burdens on researchers. More comprehensive solutions for lifecycle open research in materials science will have to overcome substantial differences in attitudes and practices.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa C. Griffin ◽  
Jyoti Khadake ◽  
Kate S. LeMay ◽  
Suzanna E. Lewis ◽  
Sandra Orchard ◽  
...  

AbstractThroughout history, the life sciences have been revolutionised by technological advances; in our era this is manifested by advances in instrumentation for data generation, and consequently researchers now routinely handle large amounts of heterogeneous data in digital formats. The simultaneous transitions towards biology as a data science and towards a ‘life cycle’ view of research data pose new challenges. Researchers face a bewildering landscape of data management requirements, recommendations and regulations, without necessarily being able to access data management training or possessing a clear understanding of practical approaches that can assist in data management in their particular research domain.Here we provide an overview of best practice data life cycle approaches for researchers in the life sciences/bioinformatics space with a particular focus on ‘omics’ datasets and computer-based data processing and analysis. We discuss the different stages of the data life cycle and provide practical suggestions for useful tools and resources to improve data management practices.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-299
Author(s):  
Stefka Tzanova

In this paper we study the changes in academic library services inspired by the Open Science movement and especially the changes prompted from Open Data as a founding part of Open Science. We argue that academic libraries face the even bigger challenges for accommodating and providing support for Open Big Data composed from existing raw data sets and new massive sets generated from data driven research. Ensuring the veracity of Open Big Data is a complex problem dominated by data science. For academic libraries, that challenge triggers not only the expansion of traditional library services, but also leads to adoption of a set of new roles and responsibilities. That includes, but is not limited to development of the supporting models for Research Data Management, providing Data Management Plan assistance, expanding the qualifications of library personnel toward data science literacy, integration of the library services into research and educational process by taking part in research grants and many others. We outline several approaches taken by some academic libraries and by libraries at the City University of New York (CUNY) to meet necessities imposed by doing research and education with Open Big Data – from changes in libraries’ administrative structure, changes in personnel qualifications and duties, leading the interdisciplinary advisory groups, to active collaboration in principal projects.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Daniel Spichtinger

Background: Data Management Plans (DMPs) are at the heart of many research funder requirements for data management and open data, including the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020. This article provides a summary of the findings of the DMP Use Case study, conducted as part of OpenAIRE Advance. Methods: As part of the study we created a vetted collection of over 800 Horizon 2020 DMPs. Primarily, however, we report the results of qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey on the experience of Horizon 2020 projects with DMPs. Results & Conclusions: We find that a significant number of projects had to develop a DMP for the first time in the context of Horizon 2020, which points to the importance of funder requirements in spreading good data management practices. In total, 82% of survey respondents found DMPs useful or partially useful, beyond them being “just” an European Commission (EC) requirement. DMPs are most prominently developed within a project’s Management Work Package. Templates were considered important, with 40% of respondents using the EC/European Research Council template. However, some argue for a more tailor-made approach. The most frequent source for support with DMPs were other project partners, but many beneficiaries did not receive any support at all. A number of survey respondents and interviewees therefore ask for a dedicated contact point at the EC, which could take the form of an EC Data Management Helpdesk, akin to the IP helpdesk. If DMPs are published, they are most often made available on the project website, which, however, is often taken offline after the project ends. There is therefore a need to further raise awareness on the importance of using repositories to ensure preservation and curation of DMPs. The study identifies IP and licensing arrangements for DMPs as promising areas for further research.


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