"Publishing data long-term with an accompanying journal publication can produce a large number of citations which will be good for your career in the Research Excellence Framework" -- said Michael Wilson, a researcher associated with the MRC Psycholinguistic Database, who presented this finding at the e-Science All-Hands Meeting in Edinburgh last month.

Edinburgh DataShare is an institutional data repository set up by the Data Library to help researchers do just this. It uses the same DSpace software as the Edinburgh Research Archive, ERA, and operates in tandem with the Publications Repository to provide a place for researchers to share the datasets on which their published papers are based.

[University Newsletter article announcing the soft launch of Edinburgh DataShare, a project deliverable and pilot service.]

UKDA has built a fedora-based repository for self-archiving of ESRC-funded data outputs that do not fit the ESDS collections development policy, allowing a larger body of research data to be shared.

A write-up of this workshop by Martin Donnelly. Includes a summary of the DataShare project manager's talk about Edinburgh's experience reaching out to potential depositors in the University and how we are using the Data Audit Framework Implementation project as an adjunct to this ongoing effort. Also includes interesting summaries of talks by other players in terms of data sharing at the University of Edinburgh.

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.

The Social Science Data Archive, DANS, Netherlands, has published quality guidelines for data archiving and "making data future-proof." An innovation is that the 17 guidelines apply in turn to data archives, but also data producers and data users.

The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything ...

DRIVER, or the Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research, is a joint collaboration between ten European partners which aims to create a knowledge base for European research. DRIVER is funded by the EU (FP6) and puts in place a test-bed of digital repositories across
Europe, to assist with the development of a knowledge infrastructure for the European Research Area. The project builds upon existing institutional repositories and national networks, from countries including the Netherlands,
Germany, France, Belgium and the UK.

This is an extensive report in PDF format. Note pages 138 -151 provide an informative overview of data curation tools, procedures, and data quality in an IR environment

The ICPSR Official Representative (OR) meeting powerpoints from 18-20 October, 2007 are now available.Topics include:
- Managing Geographic Data: Formats, Versions, and Legal Issues
- Symposium: "The Present and Future of Federal Funding for Social Science Research"
- Thinking Big: Promoting Relationships That Promote Data
- Institutional Repositories and Data Archives: The Facts, the Fit, the Future
- Tinkering with Teaching: ICPSR Initiatives to Connect Data and Classroom
- Privacy in the Information Age
- The Politics of Political Polling - Social Science Computing and Technology on Campus
- New activities/projects at ICPSR
- Health Data: Comparative Issues
- New Frontiers in Information Retrieval and Resource Discovery
- International Data Issues: An International Perspective on Archiving and Data Sharing

ICPSR is the Inter-university consortium for political and social research,
an institutional membership-based social science data archive based at the University of Michigan.