School districts wrestle with how to keep teachers and kids segregated on social sites.

The idea underlying the open access movement in academia is a simple one: most scientific research is funded by the public through federal or state grants.

Over the last decade, there have been significant changes in data sharing policies and in the data sharing environment faced by life science researchers. Using data from a 2013 survey of over 1600 life science researchers, we analyze the effects of sharing policies of funding agencies and journals. We also examine the effects of new sharing infrastructure and tools (i.e., third party repositories and online supplements). We find that recently enacted data sharing policies and new sharing infrastructure and tools have had a sizable effect on encouraging data sharing. In particular, third party repositories and online supplements as well as data sharing requirements of funding agencies, particularly the NIH and the National Human Genome Research Institute, were perceived by scientists to have had a large effect on facilitating data sharing. In addition, we found a high degree of compliance with these new policies, although noncompliance resulted in few formal or informal sanctions. Despite the overall effectiveness of data sharing policies, some significant gaps remain: about one third of grant reviewers placed no weight on data sharing plans in their reviews, and a similar percentage ignored the requirements of material transfer agreements. These patterns suggest that although most of these new policies have been effective, there is still room for policy improvement.

Policy’s implementation is key to accelerating biomedical discoveries.

Funding for Office of Science

What an ethics policy might look like.

The scholarly communication landscape is rapidly changing and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of data management. Mandates by major funding agencies, further expanded by executive order and pending legislation in 2013, require many research grant applicants to provide data management plans for preserving and making their research data openly available. However, do faculty researchers have the requisite skill sets and are their institutions providing the necessary infrastructure to comply with these mandates? To answer these questions, three groups were surveyed in 2012: research and teaching faculty, sponsored programs office staff, and institutional repository librarians. Survey results indicate that while faculty desire to share their data, they often lack the skills to do this effectively. Similarly, while repository managers and sponsored programs offices often provide the necessary infrastructure and knowledge, these resources are not being promoted effectively to faculty. The study offers important insights about services academic libraries can provide to support faculty in their data management efforts: providing tools for sharing research data; assisting with describing, finding, or accessing research data; providing information on copyright and ownership issues associated with data sets; and assisting with writing data management plans.

Clear expectations will ease the way for data managers.

I finished Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma on Friday, and it’s got me thinking again about professional ethics and public engagement in the archives and records management community. After an exchange of…

The University of Maryland Libraries have been managing digital content for about a decade without an official digital preservation policy. The Libraries’ 2013 Strategic Plan called for the development of preservation plans, including "bit-preservation, digital object preservation, and metadata management pertaining to preservation of digital objects and their aggregations." A task force examined policies at other institutions and evaluated needs and strategic directions. The resulting high-level policy and appendix based on the Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC) will direct all future planning, policies, and implementation. This case study will describe the process and planned steps towards implementation.

It’s here, and I have to say it came quicker than I expected – the first big stick for researchers – the PLoS data sharing policy. What this policy means for researchers is that i…

Apparently, many scientists have rather strong feelings about data sharing mandates. In the wake of PLOS’s recent announcement–which says that, effective now, all papers published in PL…

UPDATE 7 MARCH: Please see new blog post UPDATE 26 FEBRUARY : A flurry of interest has arisen around the revised PLOS…

Shows how to use the AIDA toolkit for assessing institutional capabilities to support digital asset management. It was given as part of module 1 of a 5-module …