Interesting article about the curation of workflow and the embedded data pipelines - implications for intractable issues surrounding the intractable research data/instrumentation/algorithm conundrum

The UK Data Archive have launched a new suite of web pages providing guidance on Data Management and Sharing. The pages aim to provide data creators, data managers and data curators with best practice strategies and methods for creating, preparing and storing shareable datasets. Advice has been divided into a number of key areas or modules providing detailed information on each topic.

Open Access to and Reuse of Research Data –
The State of the Art in Finland

Motivated by OECD's open access guidelines (and funded by the Ministry of Education) the Finnish Data Archive carried out an online survey targeting professors of human sciences, social sciences and behavioural sciences in Finnish universities. The aim of this survey was to chart how the universities in Finland have organised the depositing of digital research data and to what extent the data are reused by the scientific community after the
original research has been completed.

Professors were asked, for example, whether their department had any guidelines on the preservation of digital research data. A great majority (90%) said no.

The URL of this article is: http://www.fsd.uta.fi/julkaisut/julkaisusarja/FSDjs07_OECD_en.pdf

Towards a Data Sharing Culture: Recommendations for Leadership from Academic Health Centers. This (US) Public Library of Science article comes up with seven recommendations to facilitate data sharing in the health and medical sciences. Note: the large number of (seemingly) relevant citations

Canada currently has no nationally adopted standards or policies governing how research data is collected, catalogued, or preserved. A new collaborative effort has been set up to address the challenges surrounding the access and preservation of this data. The Research Data Strategy (RDS) Working Group is a multi-disciplinary group of universities, institutes, libraries, granting agencies, and individual researchers with a shared recognition of the pressing need to deal with Canadian data management issues.

Quoted: The RIN report "To share or not to share: Publication and quality assurance of research data outputs" (June 2008) presents the findings from a study of whether or not researchers do make their research data available to others, and the issues they encounter when doing so.

The DOE Data Explorer (DDE) locates scientific research data - such as computer simulations, numeric data files, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia, and scientific images - generated by DOE-sponsored research in various science disciplines. The DOE Data Explorer includes a database of citations prepared by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). It is intended for students, the public, and to researchers who are looking for experimental or observational data outside their normal field of expertise.

As promised, SHERPA's Juliette service (compliments Romeo) now lists and rates the open access policies of research funders (UK and beyond) not only for peer reviewed outputs but for research data. Policies are given a pass-fail rating based on the following criteria: 1) Data archiving is required. 2) Data must be deposited within five years.

PANGAEA - Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data is an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. Most of the data are freely available and can be used by referencing the related publication or the dataset citation. The data description (metadata) of all data sets are visible and include the principle investigators (PI) name and email for contact.