News & Articles

Ismail Serageldin, Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, will give a keynote presentation at CODATA 2017

The organisers and programme committee are very pleased to announce that Ismail Serageldin, Founding Director of the Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, will give a keynote presentation at the CODATA 2017 International Conference ‘Global Challenges and Data-Driven Science’, 8-13 October, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.
 
ISMAIL SERAGELDIN, Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the new Library of Alexandria, inaugurated in 2002, is currently, Emeritus Librarian, and member of the Board of Trustees of the Library of Alexandria. He is advisor to the Egyptian Prime Minister in matters concerning culture, science, and museums. He serves as Chair and Member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research, scientific and international institutions, including as co-Chair of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center (NGIC), and serves on the Advisory Committee of the World Social Science Report for 2013 and 2016, as well as the UNESCO-supported World Water Scenarios (2013) and the executive council of the Encyclopedia of Life (2010) and Chairs the Executive Council of the World Digital Library (2010).  He has held many international positions including as Vice President of the World Bank (1993–2000). He also co-chaired the African Union’s high level panel for Biotechnology (2006) and again for Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) in 2012-2013, and was a member of the ICANN Panel for the review of the internet future (2013). 
 
 
Deadline for Session Proposals and Abstracts for Presentations, 28 July

The deadline for to propose conference sessions and papers is now only one week away 28 July: see http://conference.codata.org/2017/


Research Fellowship on OpenCitations [Deadline: 7 August 2017]

The OpenCitations Corpus (OCC, http://opencitations.net) is a new repository of open citation data harvested from the scholarly literature. As the Co-Directors of the OpenCitations Corpus, we are writing to let you know that we have a Research Fellowship available in the Digital and Semantic Publishing Laboratory (DASPLab) of the University of Bologna, Italy, to work with Dr Silvio Peroni on the OpenCitations Corpus.

We seek a skilled computer scientist / research engineer who is an expert in Web Interface Design and Information Visualization, who will be able to develop novel data visualizations and query services over the stored data to facilitate interaction with and human comprehension of the citation information, as well as assisting Dr Peroni with expansion of the volume of data held, and other technical aspects of running the OpenCitations Corpus. Expertise in Semantic Web technologies, Linked Data, and Web technologies would be highly desirable, plus a strong and demonstrable commitment to open science and team-working abilities. The position is for one year duration, starting 1st November 2017, and is funded by the Sloan Foundation. It has a net salary (exempt from income tax, after deduction of social security contributions) in excess of 23K euros per year.

Applications are open and will close on 7 August 2017, 23:59 CET. The call for application and the other related documents (activity plan, call form, and affidavit form) can be downloaded from the following URL:

http://dasplab.cs.unibo.it/index.php/job/postdoc-sloan-opencitations/


Governance of domain specific data and metadata standards to support FAIR Data

By: Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma

On May 26, 2016, I attended the Workshop on Research Data Management [http://www.iucr.org/resources/data/dddwg/new-orleans-workshop#gabb2] at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association, New Orleans, LA, USA and gave a talk on Open Science, FAIR DATA and Data Standards.

The workshop was organized by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr)’s Diffraction Data Deposition Working Group (DDDWG), and was co-chaired by John R. Helliwell and Brian McMahon, who are the DDDWG chair and the IUCr CODATA representative, respectively. The workshop had two plenary sessions: (1) What every experimentalist needs to know about recording essential metadata of primary (raw) diffraction data and (2) Research Data Management policy mandates and requirements on Principal Investigators (PIs). It also covered a technical session on high-data-rate/high-performance-computing issues of research data management for MX. The first plenary session was closely related to the efforts within DDDWG, and the second session covered broad topics on the open science trends, open data mandates, best practices and successful stories. The technical session covered demonstration of state-of-the-art progress from industry.

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Dryad and DANS partner for long-term preservation of rich research data repository

Dryad and DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) announce a new collaboration to 
ensure long-term preservation and accessibility to curated scientific data. The Dryad Digital
Repository makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Over 50,000
researchers who have already deposited research data with Dryad can count on continuous
open access to their data packages with an extra layer of security and recoverability as a result of this partnership.


Public content on Dryad servers, currently over 15,000 data packages and 50,000 files, will be backed up in the DANS archive regularly to minimize the risk of loss or corruption of data over time. DANS will also serve as Dryad’s successor archive to maintain discoverability of Dryad Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) now and into the future. Metadata will be available in open access format to all researchers using the DANS online archiving system, EASY.


“We are excited that this partnership ensures that data on Dryad will remain accessible and
linked to the scholarly literature in any unlikely disruption of Dryad services. DANS has proven to be a natural fit for us in this effort,” said Executive Director Meredith Morovati. “Dryad and DANS share a deep commitment to the stewardship of global scientific data on behalf of more than 50,000 researchers who trust us with their data and hundreds of publishing partners working with Dryad to link this data to scholarly literature.”


Henk Harmsen, Deputy director of DANS added, “Together with Dryad we are committed to
making digital research data and related outputs Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and
Reusable (FAIR). This collaboration minimizes the risk of loss or corruption of data over time.
We are pleased to extend our capacity and data archive by partnering with Dryad.”


The Digital Revolution and the Future of Science: Jisc Futures Article

Geoffrey Boulton writes the first in a series of articles from Jisc on research in the age of open science
 
Information and knowledge have always been essential drivers of social progress, and the technologies through which knowledge is acquired, stored and communicated have been determinants of the nature and scale of their impact.
 
A technological milestone was passed at the turn of the millennium when the global volume of data and information that was stored digitally overtook that stored in analogue systems on paper, tape and disk. A digital explosion ensued that has immensely increased the annual rate of data acquisition and storage (40 times greater than 10 years ago), and dramatically reduced its cost.
 
In 2003, the human genome was sequenced for the first time. It had taken 10 years and cost $4 billion. It now takes three days and costs $1,000 (£770). 
 
Like all revolutions that have not yet run their course, it is often difficult to distinguish reality and potential from hype. So what lies behind the “big data” phrase that has become the rallying cry of this revolution, and with which all levels of business and government, and increasingly universities and researchers, are struggling to come to terms? 
 


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