Alliance for Permanent Access News

Organised by IEDA and Elsevier Research Data Services, the International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences is created to improve preservation and access of research data, particularly of dark data, and share the varied ways that these data are being processed, stored, and used. For more information see http://researchdata.elsevier.com/datachallenge
The organisers are interested in receiving submissions from groups who have developed and completed projects that have digitized previously unavailable content or that have facilitated and improved the ingestion of research data. The final submission deadline is October 10, 2013.

APARSEN (Alliance for Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe Network), a project being undertaken for the APARSEN Project that runs under the ICT directorate of the EUROPEAN COMMISSION. We aim to produce a study which evaluates digital preservation in terms of importance, value, benefits, currents activities, costs and future involvement among European libraries, archives and research organizations.

This survey is aimed at individuals who are either actively engaged in digital preservation or can comment on the state of the digital preservation activity (or lack of)  within their organisation from a strategic perspective.

The results of the survey should allow us to build a picture of the state of digital preservation and related challenges in libraries and archives across Europe. This picture will help to create a roadmap to inform future actions to ensure that our organisations can position themselves to address the challenges of digital preservation into the future.

This is a user-friendly survey which you should be able to complete within 20 minutes.

To begin, please click the survey URL below:

https://es.surveymonkey.com/s/APARSEN_SURVEY

We would like to inform you that the survey results will not reflect any particular company perspective as gathered results will be treated in an anonymous way in compliance with the Data Protection Act.

If you have any questions regarding the survey, please contact:

Xenia Beltran, xenia.beltran@grupoinmark.com

Panos Georgiou,  panos@lis.upatras.gr

Thank you for your participation.

Kind regards,

..David

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 12, 2012

CONTACT: Andrea Higginbotham, SPARC, andrea@arl.org; 202-296-2296 <tel:202-296-2296>
Amy Weil, Open Society Foundations, aweil@sorosny.org; 212-548-0381 <tel:212-548-0381>

Scientists, Foundations, Libraries, Universities, and Advocates Unite and Issue New Recommendations to Make Research Freely Available to All Online

WASHINGTON – In response to the growing demand to make research free and available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, a diverse coalition today issued new guidelines (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/boai-10-recommendations) that could usher in huge advances in the sciences, medicine, and health.

The recommendations were developed by leaders of the Open Access movement (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/participants), which has worked for the past decade to provide the public with unrestricted, free access to scholarly research—much of which is publicly funded. Making the research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers.

“The reasons to remove restrictions as far as possible are to share knowledge and accelerate research. Knowledge has always been a public good in a theoretical sense. Open Access makes it a public good in practice,” said professor Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Harvard University and a senior researcher at SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

The Open Access recommendations include the development of Open Access policies in institutions of higher education and in funding agencies, the open licensing of scholarly works, the development of infrastructure such as Open Access repositories and creating standards of professional conduct for Open Access publishing. The recommendations also establish a new goal of achieving Open Access as the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and in every country within ten years’ time.

“Science and scholarship are activities funded from the public purse because society believes they will lead to a better future in terms of our health, environment, and culture,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC. “Anything that maximises the efficacy and efficiency of research benefits every one of us. Open Access is a major tool in that quest. These new recommendations will underpin future developments in communicating the results of research over the next decade.”

Today, Open Access is increasingly recognized as a right rather than an abstract ideal. The case for rapid implementation of Open Access continues to grow. Open Access benefits research and researchers; increases the return to taxpayers on their investment in research; and amplifies the social value of research, funding agencies, and research institutions.

The Open Access recommendations are the result of a meeting hosted earlier this year by the Open Society Foundations, on the tenth anniversary of the landmark Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read), which first defined Open Access.

“Foundations rarely have the good fortune to be actively present at the birth of a world-wide movement that fundamentally changes the rules of the game and provides immediate benefit to the world,” said István Rév, director of the Open Society Archives and a member of the Open Society Foundations Global Board. “This is what happened when the Open Society Foundations initiated a meeting at the end of 2001 that gave birth to the Open Access movement.”

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SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. Working with local communities in more than 100 countries, the Open Society Foundations support justice and human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education. The Open Society Foundations is on the Web at http://www.soros.org <http://www.soros.org/> .

In June 2012, DataCite and the International Association of STM Publishers (STM) issued a joint statement on the Linkability and Citability of Research Data (http://www.stm-assoc.org/2012_06_14_STM_DataCite_Joint_Statement.pdf). CrossRef is pleased to join and support this statement and the best practices for data it recommends.

CrossRef, a not-for-profit association of representing 4,000 scholarly publisher with 55 million content items (journal and conference proceeding articles and books and book chapters), is committed to the interoperability of CrossRef and DataCite’s services which are based on the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System, recently approved as an ISO Standard (ISO 26324:2012, Information and documentation — Digital object identifier system).
Specifically, CrossRef encourages publishers to use DataCite DOIs to link to data sets referenced in the published literature, and encourages authors of research papers to use CrossRef DOIs to link from data deposited in DataCite repositories to the published articles that draw on that data. CrossRef and DataCite are also collaborating on joint services, such as DOI Content Negotiation (http://crosscite.org/cn/), to enable publishers and data repositories to automatically interlink their content.

About CrossRef CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org) is a not-for-profit membership association of scholarly publishers. Since its founding in 2000, CrossRef has provided reference linking services for over 55 million content items, including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, reference entries, technical reports, standards, and data sets. CrossRef also provides additional services designed to improve trust in the scholarly communications process.

See http://geopreservation.org/

Geospatial data, including satellite images, digital maps, and other kinds of geospatial information in digital form represent our scientific, scholarly, and cultural heritage. Geospatial data and information often represent aspects of the physical environment and events that have been captured at a particulur moment and therefore, cannot be reproduced. In addition to their use in research, education, and decision-making, geospatial data are used in various professions to represent characteristics of our world. Preserving geospatial data and information resources will help to ensure that they can continue to be used in the future.

This Resource Center is being developed to offer capabilities for finding freely available web-based resources about the preservation of geospatial information. A variety of selected resources are being added, including reports, presentations, standards, and information about tools for preparing geospatial assets for long-term access and use. The resources are indexed to enable searching of titles and are categorized to facilitate discovery by choosing among topics, resource types, or both. Topics on the stewardship and management of geospatial data include appraisal and selection, citation, content standards, describing and preparing, depositing and documenting, digitized maps, Geographic Information Systems or GIS, preservation formats, satellite imagery, software dependencies, virtual environments, and many others.

The Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center is a project of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), which is working with a national network of partners on a strategy for preserving digital information for use in the future.

Information about the NDIIPP, its partners, projects, and events can be found on the NDIIPP web site, which is accessible at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/

Email sent by Angie, Maps-L Moderator

Half of technology leaders are bullish on big data

About half of technology experts think the gathering and analysis of troves of big data will produce a “huge positive” for society, while about 40 percent think it will produce a “big negative,” a study released Friday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

See http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2012/07/half-technology-leaders-are-bullish-big-data/56903/?oref=ng-channelriver

The revised OAIS has been released by CCSDS. This issue includes: clarifications to many concepts, in particular Authenticity with the concept of Transformational Information Property introduced; corrections and improvements in diagrams; addition of Access Rights Information to PDI. Annex A from the previous issue, describing existing archives, has been removed. A security annex has been added as required by CCSDS.

The document is available from http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf

From William Kilbride:

The Digital Preservation Coalition is delighted to announce the launch of the Digital Preservation Awards 2012.

‘Threats to the digital estate are distinctive and new so the tools and processes necessary to ensure long term access – and impact – are also new’, explained William Kilbride of the DPC. ‘The DPC was established in 2002 to help agencies meet this new and growing challenge, and in 2004 we sponsored a small prize to mark outstanding contributions to the field. It was so popular that we’ve offered the prize every other year since, and each time the quality and number of nominations has grown.

‘This year, the award takes a new form. In the past a single award was offered as one of the Conservation Awards. But because 2012 is the tenth anniversary of the founding of the DPC, we’re offering 4 separate prizes, including a special ‘DPC Decennial Prize’ for the most outstanding contribution to digital preservation in the last decade. There are also prizes for ‘Teaching and Communication’ and for ‘Research and Development’ as well as an innovative Digital Preservation Challenge being offered via the Open Planets Foundation.’

‘We’re calling on all our friends and colleagues – the whole digital preservation community – to help us get the best possible set of applications.’

‘The criteria are defined broadly, encompassing any initiative that has helped ensure ‘our digital memory is available tomorrow’, and although the DPC’s membership is in the UK and Ireland, this is an international competition. We encourage all manner of proposals – projects, services, ideas, books, methodologies, standards, working groups and campaigns: all are welcome.’

The application pack is available online at: http://www.dpconline.org/advocacy/awards

The current holders are Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion University, who won the prize in 2010 for the Memento Project. Other previous winners include the UK National Archives and the PREMIS Working Group.

Applications are due by the 17th August at which point they will be scrutinised by a judging panel drawn from the DPC membership. A shortlist will be announced in October and DPC members will be invited to vote for their favourite proposals. The winner will be announced at a special ceremony in London on 3rd December.

We are delighted to announce that C-DAC (Pune, India) has joined APA. C-DAC hosts the Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation which is the flagship project under the National Digital Preservation Programme of Department of Information Technology, Government of India.

See http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/index.php/membership/ourmembers/c-dac/ for more details.

The SCIDIP-ES project is conducting an on-line user consultation (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/57YTKQL) to understand the current architectures, technologies and approaches used by data repositories and users, with an initial focus on the Earth Science community, for the purposes of data preservation, access and management.

The SCIDIP-ES team, and the APA, would like to invite you to participate in this on-line survey and contribute to the definition of the tools and services being developed by the project. As part of the survey you will also be given the opportunity to join the SCIDIP-ES contact list and become a member of the wider long-term data preservation user community. This will allow you to be informed on projects achievements and to exploit the relevant results.

The survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/57YTKQL) will remain open until 29 February 2012.

We look forward to receiving your submission.

A report about the APA conference has been put on the web site of the Indian Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation – see http://www.ndpp.in/index.php/events/apa-2011.html

The APA Strategic Plan for the period 2011-2015 has been published: Download: APA Strategic Plan 2011-2015.

CODATA has created a new Task Group with the goal of creating an Inventory of data that are at risk, and whose unique scientific information is in danger of being lost to posterity. The Task Group is chaired by Elizabeth Griffin, with John Faundeen as vide chair.

See the web site at http://ils.unc.edu/~janeg/dartg/ for more details

SLAC – Stanford is seeking an operational web developer for the INSPIRE repository, built on the Invenio digital-library software.  INSPIRE is a dynamic international collaboration which is building, enhancing and operating the INSPIRE information service, a key working tool for 50,000 scientists worldwide to access crucial research information.   INSPIRE has recently completed its beta period and has entered production. It is run by a collaboration of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, and SLAC.

The operational web developer will be responsible for a variety of day-to-day duties necessary to the ongoing management of an internationally utilized information resource.  These include, but are not limited to: new feature development on the Invenio repository management platform, production deployment, maintenance programming, systems automation and test.  At SLAC, the operational web developer will be part of a small, multidisciplinary team.  As part of the INSPIRE collaboration, the web developer will communicate effectively and work in a highly collaborative, multicultural community.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Physics, or related field
• Strong ability to develop, test, and monitor performance of application code; to respond quickly to staff and user needs; and to produce accurate and reliable results in a dynamic, time-sensitive and high-visibility environment
• Experience with Unix/Linux and one or more of the following: Python, JavaScript, Perl
• Experience in web management, system administration, or operations.
• Ability to work and communicate effectively with others in a highly collaborative, multicultural community.

Desired Skills:

• Experience with LaTeX, XML/XSL, git, Lucene/SOLR/Other search engines, digital document repository systems (Invenio, DSpace, etc)
• Experience with scholarly publications, search engines, information retrieval
• Experience with scientific research
• Experience in logfile analysis, data mining
• Experience with lightweight development methodologies such as agile or scrum

INSPIRE Background: Operated by CERN (Geneva), DESY (Hamburg), Fermilab (Chicago), and SLAC (Stanford) and built on the Open Source Invenio digital library software, INSPIRE serves 1 million records to 50,000 High-Energy Physics researchers worldwide. INSPIRE, in production at http://inspirehep.net, provides fast metadata and full-text searches, author disambiguation, citation analysis, and is expanding its content and services in a community-centric approach, in addition to journal publications and other scientific contents. We anticipate users will soon be submitting scientific documents, and large scale recovery of historical OCR’ed material will take place, with hundreds of thousands of documents from 3 to 300 pages long.  Further, we will explore and expand initiatives for figures and tables extraction from the text, as well as contextual information on references.  Finally INSPIRE is heavily involved in Data Preservation initiatives in the HEP field and author ID initiatives in scholarly communications in general.  For more information on INSPIRE see http://projecthepinspire.net.

For further information and to apply please visit
https://tbe.taleo.net/NA12/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=SLAC&cws=1&rid=601

Dear Sir or Madam,

The Commission has just published a number of roadmaps concerning some of the policy areas you selected when registering your organisation in the Transparency Register.

The roadmaps concern the following policy areas:

• Research and Technology
• Audiovisual and Media
• Information Society

To consult all the existing roadmaps please refer to the following website:
http://ec.europa.eu/governance/impact/planned_ia/planned_ia_en.htm

For further information please consult the following links:

• Shared use of radio spectrum
• Web accessibility action plan
• Spectrum for more efficient energy production and distribution
• Council Recommendation on IT security standards in public procurement
• Recommendation on non-discrimination remedies including functional separation
• Shaping leadership in Future and Emerging Technologies through large-scale flagship initiatives
• The Future Internet – Where Europe needs to go
• Recommendation on cost methodologies for key access products
• Communication on the developments in the area of access to scientific information
• Framework for the European Research Area (ERA)
• Communication on enhancing and focussing international cooperation in Research and Innovation
• State of the Innovation Union 2012 – accelerating change
• Renewal of European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership
• European Strategy and Action plan for a sustainable bio-based economy by 2020
• Commission’s recommendation to the Member States on Responsible Research and Innovation
• European Strategy and Action plan towards a sustainable bio-based economy by 2020
• Think 2014! A European Year for promoting healthy minds, learning and well-being

The European Commission (e-Infrastructures Unit) kindly invites you to attend the workshop on

 

Digital objects identifiers and unique author identifiers to enable services for data quality assessment, provenance and access

 

 

December 2nd, 2011 (9:00 – 11:30)

British Library Conference Centre
96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB, UK

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/quickinfo/loc/stp/index.html

Program

08:45 – 09:00:  Registration and gathering together

09:00 – 09: 05: Welcome from hosting organization (DataCite)

09:05 – 09:15: Mr. Konstantinos Glinos, European Commission, Head of Unit, e-Infrastructures: Opening/ Brief overview on e-Infrastructures

09:15 – 09:20: Mr. Carlos Morais-Pires, European Commission, Project Officer, e-Infrastructures: EC and the DIGOIDUNA study

09:20 – 10:10: Prof. Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento: Digital object identifiers and unique authors identifiers to enable services for data quality assessment, provenance and access

10:10 – 10:20: DATACITE statement on the DIGOIDUNA study

10:20 – 10:30: ORCID statement on the DIGOIDUNA study

10:30 – 11:30: Q&A, feedback from experts, next steps

Abstract

The strategic role of e-Science infrastructures as a crucial asset enabling European scientific advances and innovation has become a central issue in the digital agenda for Europe. These infrastructures provide a distributed virtual environment where scientific resources can be accessed, shared and exploited supporting global research collaboration and opening new frontiers to data processing and scientific discovery.

In this context, the functionality to unambiguously locate and access digital objects, associate them with the related authors and other relevant entities in the scientific production chain (e.g. collaborators, institutions, projects) becomes essential. Digital identifiers play a fundamental role in this respect, underpinning added-value services such as data quality assessment, provenance and access.

The objective of the DIGOIDUNA study is to support policy makers at European, Member State and research institution levels in assessing impacts and understanding the opportunities and challenges connected to managing digital identifiers within the context of scientific data e-infrastructures (SDIs), providing instruments to support decision-making on solutions that will have a long-lasting influence on scientific research and on the long term access, preservation and integration of valuable data and knowledge assets held within the sector.

The DIGOIDUNA final event has been organized to report and share the results of the DIGOIDUNA study and will be focused on three main areas addressed by the study:  1) analyzing the fundamental role of identifiers as enablers of value in e-infrastructures and presenting forward looking scenarios as examples of the benefits of a systematic usage of identifiers for digital objects and contributors in SDIs; 2) reporting the results of the analysis of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) associated with establishing in Europe an open, dynamic and sustainable governance of e-infrastructure using identifiers for digital objects and contributors; 3) presenting the main challenges and recommendations which European Commission and other relevant stakeholders should address to develop an open and sustainable e-infrastructure for locators of digital objects and identifiers of authors.

More information about the DIGOIDUNA study is available at http://www.digoiduna.eu/

To register for the event please fill in the spreadsheet at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Akaz6qPMhLzQdGZtX2tkYWhxdWM4S1NXZm1RblpQYWc

ODE has published a Report on Integration of Data and Publications.

Scholarly communication is the foundation of modern research where empirical evidence is interpreted and communicated as published hypothesis driven research.  Many current and recent reports highlight the impact of advancing technology on modern research and consequences this has on scholarly communication.  As part of the ODE project this report sought to coalesce current though and opinions from numerous and diverse sources to reveal opportunities for supporting a more connected and integrated scholarly record.  Four perspectives were considered, those of the Researcher who generates or reuses primary data, Publishers who provide the mechanisms to communicate research activities and Libraries & Data enters who maintain and preserve the evidence that underpins scholarly communication and the published record.  This report finds the landscape fragmented and complex where competing interests can sometimes confuse and confound requirements, needs and expectations. Equally the report identifies clear opportunity for all stakeholders to directly enable a more joined up and vital scholarly record of modern research

After many years of steady, patient, work, the standard for Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories has been published. It is available free of charge from CCSDS 652.0-M-1, and will, in a short while, be available on the ISO site as ISO 16363 – for a fee.

It derives from the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) which is also available from the CCSDS site as well as ISO.  The updated version of OAIS is finally being published.

An update on ISO 16363, its sister standard 16919, and OAIS (ISO 14721), will be given at the APA conference in London, 8 -9 November.

These standards launch a new age for digital preservation – allowing there to be a third party ISO audits of repositories so that we can know whether or not they deserve to be described as Trustworthy.

Areas of untapped potential for the development of the European Research Area (ERA)

This public consultation aims at gathering views and evidence from stakeholders on the key obstacles which have to be tackled to achieve a well-functioning ERA.
Completing ERA will require the support and effort of all EU Member States and Associated Countries and their stakeholders (e.g. research performing organisations including universities, funding organisations, researchers, private sector and civil society).

For full details see http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/era/consultation_en.htm

We are pleased to announce that CINES has joined the APA.

C.I.N.E.S. (Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur), is located in Montpellier (France), and offers computer services to the scientific community in public research and higher education. It is a public national institution, under the authority of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

CINES operates state of the art computer services in:

• High-Performance Computing (supercomputer ranked 24 in the Top500 as of June 2011) : facilities, services and user’s support;
• Long term data and digital document preservation: CINES is the national center for the archive of PhD Theses from French universities, and several other repositories related to humanities (PAC, the CINES preservation platform, stores 12To of scientific data as of June 2011);
• Hosting of computer equipment.

It also offers training sessions in High Performance Computing and Internet Data Communication, in cooperation with RENATER, the French national network for research and higher education (CIREN).

CINES is one of the Tier-1 computer operators and sites of national relevance selected by GENCI, in charge of financing large HPC infrastructures for the French public research.

CINES is currently involved in European projects such as PRACE, PRACE-1IP, PRACE-2IP, HPC Europa 2, APARSEN, EUDAT, etc.