[open-science] the early-career guide to doing open science?

[Stacy Konkiel]

> I am not a supporter of Institutional repositories for data. They are library-oriented and extremely scattered. I favour national libraries (e.g. the British Library in the UK).

I disagree (somewhat). IRs may not have been equipped to handle data
in the past, but that is changing. Libraries are (slowly) moving away
from the "I know what's best for you" approach and starting to build
services that researchers need (not just those that serve the library
and administration). Good IRs (such as IU, if I may say so) have
started partnering with uni Research Offices and IT to provide large
scale storage services for researchers. For researchers who are simply
looking for free storage with versioning capabilities, I think it's at
least worth exploring if your IR provides what you're looking for.

That being said, subject repositories might be the way to go, as many
build services specific to what is needed/standards for your field.

I'm not sure what national libraries in the US might have to offer. If
anyone has guidance to that point, I'd be interested to hear it.

Respectfully, Peter: does the OKFN need to build a new repository or
would time/effort/money be better spent partnering with various
libraries and IRs to improve existing repositories, to better serve
the needs of scientists? There's a large gap, as you pointed out,
between what purpose library IRs serve and those built by scientists.
What if the OKFN were to create "common sense guidelines" (and then
instructions for implementation, written in partnership with libraries
using various IR platforms) for what scientists need/want out of IRs
(in terms of data), so that IR managers could go about making changes
to existing repositories, to fit that need? There have been a few
posts/papers/presentations made, but no solid, widely-used guidelines
(written by scientists, for librarians) for implementation. Better to
use less resources and improve the existing tools than create (yet
another) repository, IMHO.

If you and the rest of the group agreed with this strategy, I'd love
to move from "lurker" status to a participating WG member to help make
such guidelines happen.


Best,
Stacy Konkiel
E-Science Librarian
Indiana University

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Greetings Tom,
>
> I understand and empathize with your problem. Although I am in an
> institution this isn't a huge amount of help. My own "solution" so far has
> been to run my own server (financed by grant money, for sure). But the main
> problem is that maintaining this oneself is costly in time and expertise. I
> am very lucky in the people I have had in my group. They have implemented,
> for example, a Jenkins (Hudson) Continuous integration system
> (http://hudson.ch.cam.ac.uk) But, since I have closed down my group its will
> inevitably decay.
>
> Universities aren't the best places for this as they are increasingly
> predicated on competition. For example in most of my infrastructure I can
> get this from the OKF - wikis, etherpads, etc. And there is a group of
> volunteers who will help with the technology.
>
> Data is a real, objective problem. I just heard that Tranche (U Mich) is
> finding difficulty staying alive. Bioinformatics has huge amounts of public
> money and uses it very well. Outside that there is Dryad (but coupled to
> publications) and Figshare.
>
> I am not a supporter of Institutional repositories for data. They are
> library-oriented and extremely scattered. I favour national libraries (e.g.
> the British Library in the UK).
>
> This triggers me to ask whether the OKF might not seek public funding for a
> data repository for science, maybe in conjunction with a national library?
>
>
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069