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.

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.

This study investigated costs to Higher Education Institutions of the preservation of research data and developed guidance to HEFCE and institutions on these issues. It also provided a methodological foundation on research data costs for the forthcoming HEFCE-sponsored feasability study for a UK research Data Service.

JISC has organised a grouping of projects interested in data curation in and out of repositories, including DataShare and the Data Audit Framework. One of the key areas of shared concerns is training.

A report-back on the recent Research Data Management Forum organised by DCC with RIN, with links to key presentations.

Chris Rusbridge examining whether repositories add value to data in terms of search engines.

Quoted: This blog aims to serve as a tool to both record the progress of the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project and to disseminate outputs and information about relevant activities in the converging domains of data curation, institutional repositories and e-Research.

(Luis Martinez Uribe was a DISC-UK member at LSE until this year and has contributed deliverables to the DataShare project. We will keep in contact with him and wish him well with his project at Oxford.)

Open Access Interview with Peter Murray-Rust (Univ. Cambridge) discussing (amongst other things) the Open Data movement