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)

Video on Enhanced Publications

Just in case you were wondering what all those SURF projects were about which took place on Enhanced Publications, a video has been made explaining not only what they are, but also how they have taken shape in different disciplines.

I especially like the animation at the end of the film as it shows how this fits in to linked data.
The video is only available in Dutch at present, will be available with English subtitles soon.

Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IT3T9IuNA0

New NARCIS is online

The new interface for the Dutch portal to research output from all research libraries is online: www.narcis.nl

The interface is improved so it is now much easier to narrow down your search when searching through the over 200.000 Open Access publications available.

Autumn School a success

The Autumn School on Tools for researchers finished yesterday. This proved to be very interesting. Though the topic was rather broad this also allowed for the exchange of insights across disciplines and at different levels of tooling. Common issues are: responsibility for the tool (is it for the IT department, the research group itself or the library), how to discover and manage researcher demands (usually come up with just in time requests), sustainability (how to ensure maintenance, development and archiving) and open source vs closed source software.
Typical for the Netherlands is the challenge faced by the universities of Applied Sciences (HBOs). They have only recently been given the responsibility to undertake research. This raises questions on: which research should we be doing, what is our position relative to the research universities and which tools do we need.

Tools for Researchers Autumn School

Just a quick plug from my work ;-)
Sorry, this is in Dutch, but the actual activity will also be in Dutch...

Van 2 tot 4 november 2009 organiseert SURFacademy in samenwerking met de Universiteit Leiden de Autumn School ‘Tools voor Onderzoekers’.

Er zijn veel (generieke) tools die handig kunnen zijn bij zowel het verrichten van onderzoek, als het communiceren over en publiceren van de resultaten. Deze Autumn School biedt de gelegenheid om kennis te maken en ervaring op te doen met deze tools. De Autumn School richt zich op onderzoekers en ondersteuners voor onderzoekers, werkzaam aan universiteiten en hogescholen.



De school start met een inleiding op het onderzoeksproces en geeft een overzicht van het brede scala aan tools dat van belang kan zijn. Vervolgens worden hier vier thema’s uitgelicht. De tools zullen in de vorm van presentaties en workshops worden uitgediept.



· In het thema e-science/grid computing wordt uitleg gegeven wat deze technologie inhoudt en de mogelijkheden die deze biedt voor onderzoek. Aan de hand van voorbeelden wordt getoond hoe deze techniek in projecten is toegepast.

· ICT biedt ook mogelijkheden om onderzoeksdata gemakkelijker op te slaan en te delen. In dit thema worden voorbeelden gegeven van faciliteiten voor het online opslaan en delen van onderzoeksdata.

· Onderzoekers werken meestal samen in nationale en internationale teams. Deze samenwerking kan met collaboratories worden ondersteund. Verschillende samenwerkingsomgevingen worden getoond die zijn gebruikt in het onderzoek en ervaringen worden gedeeld.

· Als laatste thema zullen een aantal Web2.0 tools worden gepresenteerd die kunnen worden ingezet op verschillende plaatsen in het onderzoeksproces.



Naast de tools in deze thema’s wordt u bij deze Autumn School ook gevraagd een eigen tool mee te nemen die u kunt delen met de andere deelnemers. Dit kan een tool zijn die aansluit bij de eerdere voorbeelden, maar het kan ook een hele andere tool zijn.

Voor meer informatie, waaronder het volledige programma en de mogelijk om je op te geven, zie: http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/bijeenkomsten/Pages/AutumnSchool.aspx



Het SURFacademy programma wordt gezamenlijk uitgevoerd door SURFnet en SURFfoundation, in samenwerking met de Nederlandse universiteiten en hogescholen. De bijeenkomsten van de SURFacademy staan open voor iedereen die werkzaam is binnen het Nederlandse hoger onderwijs.



Datum: maandag 2 november 2009 t/m woensdag 4 november 2009

Kosten: € 150

Locatie: Leiden

Can I reuse research data? The answer according to Dutch law

A new report has just been published on the legal situation regarding the reuse of research data, according to Dutch law. This report was commissioned by SURF and has been written by CIER. The report (in Dutch) can be found here.

Of course this is quite complicated legal stuff, so to keep it simple there are a few standard questions which have been answered. This straightforward explanation can be found here.
(Don't forget to read the disclaimer though)

Video on the archiving of enhanced publications

The video below was created as a part of the European DRIVER II project. In this animation created by Eugene Durr for the royal library and Delft University you can see how the archiving of enhanced publications is organised. The main challenge is to archive the text, the data and the relationship between these two quite different files.
You might recognise the voice over ;-)
See: http://www.surfmedia.nl/app/video/D5CHvHq2d27nAnHDhOrbxaOo/play?format_id=GyhlyRi8C5t5dzDRwit19kDf&mode=object

Data sharing statement in journal

The BMJ is asking authors to end their article with a Data sharing statement.
See: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/338/mar25_1/b1252
It does not oblige the author to actually share their data, but it is a first step in thinking about the underlying data and also to make the underlying data slightly more transparent. I wonder when further journals will follow.
(Off the SOAN blog.)