Interviewing on ANDS and RDA, in the Netherlands

Just in case you were wondering what it is like in Australia in the research data landscape? I am afraid I can´t tell you yet as my visa has not yet come through. Meanwhile I am still working for Knowledge Exchange and am quite busy organising workshops and planning the future of the initiative.

However, Andrew Treloar from ANDS can tell you all about the landscape and he will be at the SURF office on Friday 4 October for a seminar ´Data Infrastructure and the Scholarly Ecosystem of the Future´. I will be interviewing him not only on the Australian landscape but also on the challenges of coordinating infrastructure across national boundaries. This is an area in which the Research Data Alliance is active and I am looking forward to hearing from Andrew on the development of this initiative and finding out where and how this will be of interest to Dutch institutions.

With a big thank you to DANS for arranging for Andrew to come to the Netherlands as visiting fellow and being willing to host this workshop.

Moving to ANDS in Australia

As you might have guessed from the last posting, I will be leaving Knowledge Exchange. I am really looking forward to starting work as Partnership Program Manager at the Australian National Data Service, ANDS for short. The Australian Commonwealth Government's Department of Industry, Innovation, Science Research and Tertiary Education has had the foresight to fund and support the development of ANDS at a time when other countries had not even started considering the value of Research Data as a very important research asset. This has allowed ANDS to become a leading organisation worldwide in setting up services like ‘Research Data Australia’ and ‘Cite My Data’ I am really looking forward to learning about the Australian landscape at work and discovering some more of the physical Australian landscape at the weekends. I will be starting work on 1st of September at the ANDS office at Monash University
in Melbourne.

Four and a half years at Knowledge Exchange

Digital Author Identifier Summit in London

It has been rather quiet on this blog. The main reason is that I put most of my energy in communicating work related stuff through Knowledge Exchange, through the website, twitter, etc. The past years at Knowledge Exchange were very lively and taught me a lot. Working with the partner organisations has shown me the value and richness of the different cultural backgrounds and approaches. I have learnt a lot from the insights of the experts. What is also great is the variety in interests of the partner organisations ranging from research funding, infrastructure funding, innovation, libraries and tackling the range from hard to soft e-infrastructure. In my view the true power behind KE is the interaction between the experts in the partner organisations and countries. It was always really inspiring to bring a group of experts together and to see how quickly discussions arose and the speed in which great ideas could be developed. The years have been quite lively, some really relevant reports were released and workshops organised. The initiative has recently been expanded with the fifth member, CSC. The challenge is now to balance large expectations and ambitions with the limited scale which is KE. It never has been a large initiative and its power has been to pick out the small ground breaking activities where it is really useful to bring knowledge together, share, develop this further and start a debate. I trust this will continue to lead to valuable results in the future.

Book on Access to Research Data in the Netherlands

The book Toegang tot Onderzoeksdata (Access to research data) is the fifth publication which has appeared in the SURFshare series and treats the sharing of research data. In this publication an overview is offered of what has already been accomplished. Existing Dutch and international initiatives are discussed, findings from studies summarized and publishers and funders explain which role they expect to play in encouraging the sharing of research data.

Although the book is in Dutch, two of the interviews are also available in an English translation.

Chapter 7 : Data in Australia and the Netherlands: perseverance and dedication is required
An interview with Andrew Treloar (ANDS) and Jeroen Rombouts (3TU Datacentrum) comparing the situation in the Netherlands to Australia.

Chapter 13: It is essential for research data to be linked to publications
An interview with Eefke Smit (STM) on the role that publishers would like to play in improving access research data.

View the book as a pdf or the translated chapters

Open Research Data Day 18th May

On 18th of May SURF will be organising a Dutch day for Open Research Data. Speakers will include scientists who have benefited from sharing research data, but also key stakeholders and the Dutch national research funder. The session will close with a discussion on what the next steps should be. Who is going to be bold enough to take these steps. This is not limited to funders, but also the role that research libraries, data centres and (very important) publishers can play. And what about the universities of applied sciences, do they have a position in this?

Registration for this afternoon seminar is still open at: http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/bijeenkomsten/Pages/OpenOnderzoeksDataDag.aspx
(The event is Dutch speaking throughout)

Publicatii augmentate - Enhanced Publications in Romanian

I am very pleased to announce that our film on Enhanced Publications is now also available with Romanian subtitles. I hope researchers at Brasov and in the rest of Romania will find this useful.

Submission fees, a viable option for OA journals?

Knowledge Exchange has just released a report bearing the title ‘Submission fees – A tool in the transition to Open Access?. The general conclusion is that there are benefits to publishers in certain cases to switch to a model in which an author pays a fee when submitting an article. Especially journals with a high rejection rate might be interested in combining submission fees with article processing charges in order to make the transition to open access easier. In certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the experi¬men¬tal life sciences, submission fees are already common.

The report has also sparked a discussion for example on the Scholarly Kitchen blog on whether this might be a viable option for OA journals in the future.

Upheaval on student thesis in Utrecht

A Dutch news site mentioned that a student´s master thesis was being withheld by the Utrecht city council as it would contain critical information on a Youth scheme in Utrecht. According to the thesis youths with a criminal background would have collected funds for internships without actually doing any work.

See: http://www.nu.nl/binnenland/2371071/gemeente-utrecht-hield-kritische-scriptie-tegen.html and http://www.dub.uu.nl/content/omstreden-scriptie-vrijdag-terug-op-uu-site

The thesis is now available on the University library website and I was really chuffed as it was a student from social sciences, so it has been included in the collection I have helped to set up years ago together with the university library.
It is now scoring as best downloaded thesis: http://studenttheses.library.uu.nl/topten.php?language=nl

For the tweets on this see: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23scriptie%20%23utrecht