JISC

Background

Publications and data are the major outputs of a majority of research disciplines. Researchers collect or generate data on the subject of interest, subject the data to analysis generating secondanry or analysed datasets, which demonstrate the feature which the researcher is interested in. These are then rendered for a suitable presentation and typically included into text documents suitable for formal publication and peer review. Traditionally, the data component is kept private to the researcher, but it is increasingly recognised that by sharing this data with other researchers, advances in scientific progress can be encourage, and the peer review process made more robust. This has been recognised for a long time in particular disciplines such as social sciences and environmental sciences which have invested in data centres to hold, maintain and disseminate data sets for those disciplines. Further, research organisations have increasingly recognised that keeping track of the published output of the organisation, is a key indicator of the success and future recognition of the organisation, and has motivated the move to establish institutional repositories.

The different processes and expectations associated with data and publications, and differerent stages of maturity in their support for have meant that different approaches have been taken for their management. Publications are typically in institutional repositories or in Publishers electronic archives; data in subject based data archives curated by subject specialists. Publications tend to go through formal peer review and the assignment of formal indentifiers under the oversight of a publisher. Data tends to have more ad hoc quality control proceedures associated with a data archive.

However, there are clear benefits in tracing the links between publications and data. Researchers can discover and inspect the data which supported the results of a publication to verify or add to the results. Data depositors can track the users of their data and how it is analysed to generate subsequent results, also gaining credit for providing useful data. Data archives and research institutions can assess the value of providing the datasets by tracking the use of the data. To this end, a number of projects have been established to explore how to coordinate and track the deposit of data and publications.

Claddier and StORE are two projects sponsored by JISC which have had some promising results on exploring techniques to support the ingest and cross-citation of data and publication. However, the require further development of these tools to provide a mechanism which can be used more widely.

In this proposal we propose to combine and further develop the results of these projects to provide a toolkit for cross-linking data and publications, and trial the tools in further applications in Social Science and Crystallography.

Objectives

In this project we will address the following specific objectives:

1. To evaluate the potential of the Claddier notification protocol within other repository support tools and use cases.
2. To extend the functionality of the Claddier notification protocol.
3. To develop notification services on different repository platforms (e.g. Fedora, DSpace)
4. To evaluate the Store tools within the context of other scientific workflows.
5. To extend the Store tools to allow notification of publishers and instiutional repositories with the ingest of data.
6. To extend and combine the Store and Claddier tools to support the ingest and notification of secondary data across repositories.
7. To develop the functionality of Store to support quality control and metadata normalisation.
8. To undertake case studies of the use of the tools in Social Science, and Crystallography.
9. To publish standard interfaces and software packages to enable the take up of the tools.
10. To undertake experience and evaluation report with recommendations for technology uptake and further work.

Project partners

• University of Edinburgh
• University of Essex (UKDA)
• University of Southampton
• STFC (eScience Centre)

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