Open Repositories 2010 in Madrid

This years the Open Repository Conference 2010 was held in Madrid organised by the he Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology FECYT and UNED, a Spanish public university that provides distance education.

Many of the talks discussed issues around research data and digital repositories. In the initial keynote, Prof. David de Roure emphasized the importance of capturing the research data but also the methods behind the data. In the future repositories will have a role in managing knowledge packs made of data, metadata, workflows, articles, presentations, results, etc.

The conference had a strong pressence from activities using the eSciDoc repository system based on Fedora. The BW eLab project uses this infrastructure to provide access to remote laboratory instruments as well as to manage the experimental data generated in the labs. During the workflow process eSync Daemon is used to monitor the file system of the computer connected to the instruments . The daemon replicates the new files and sends to a deposit where metadata is extracted to them deposit data and metadata in eSciDoc. A similar synchronization is used in the BRIL Project to monitor researcher's own desktop to capture as much data and metadata as possible.

Another interesting talk presented an open source repository for medical scientific research known as MIDAS. The system is used for the Insight Journal which provides open-access to articles, data, code, and reviews with an archive which hosts public collections of image datasets such as MRIs.

Other repository frameworks included Hydra, a collaboration between the Universities of Hull, Stanford and Virginia, that uses a technical architecture based on Fedora with a toolkit of reusable components that can assist with a range of content management, access and preservation. The University of Hull IR provides a Hydra use case.

Microsoft announced the release of v2.0 of their repository platform Zentity which makes use of the Open Data Protocol and uses Pivot for visualising and organising the data (see this example of pivot in action). The installation support services such as OAI-ORE and SWORD.

In the national approaches session the results of the Australian institutional research repository data readiness surveys 2010 were presented. Although repository managers are aware of ANDS and its services, there is little use of them and less than half of respondents were planning to incoorporate data in their repositories.

This has truly been a rewarding and stimulating conference.

2nd EIDCSR Workshop "Institutional Policy and Guidance for Research Data" on 29th March 2010

The second EIDCSR Workshop will take place on 29th of March at the Rewley House in Oxford. Following the policy development work undertaken at the University as part of the project, the event will focus on issues around the development and implementation of institutional policy and guidance for research data. A fantastic group of speakers from Oxford, Southampton, Edinburgh, Melbourne and the BBSRC will discuss:

• data management and sharing policy at different levels such as research council, HEI institutions and research departments;
• how research records and data management policy and guidance can be useful to researchers and how to involve researchers in their development;
• how to encourage implementation of institutional policy at a local or departmental level;
• how to encourage across the institution the sharing of best practice in research records and data management.

To book a place please email eidcsr@oucs.ox.ac.uk

First EIDCSR workshop and executive board meeting

Yesterday was a busy day for the EIDCSR Project.

In the morning, the first project event took place at Rewley House in Oxford with an exciting group of speakers brought together under the theme of "Data curation: from lab to reuse". Their presentations are now available on the project website and a report will be produced shortly.

The afternoon served to held the first EIDCSR Executive Board meeting where progress and next steps for the project

were discussed with the extraordinary helpful and encouraging members of the board.

Overall, a great day providing loads of food for thought.

Data imperative event

The data imperative event organized the RLUK/SCONUL Task Force on e-Research was held on Wednesday 3 June in Oxford with support from the Oxford e-Research Centre, RLUK, SCONUL and RIN.

This was an excellent opportunity to confirm the extraordinary interest of librarians in this area as well as the difficulty to clarify their role and where the necessary funding comes from to allow addressing the challenge. Chris Keene shares his notes of the event from his blog and RLUK will be shortly making the presentations available.

In the mean time you can access Prof. Paul Jeffrey's introduction to the workshop and my talk describing Oxford's recent work in this area.