RO-Crate is a community effort to establish a lightweight approach to packaging research data with their metadata. It is based on schema.org annotations in JSON-LD, and aims to make best-practice in formal metadata description accessible and practical for use in a wider variety of situations, from an individual researcher working with a folder of data, to large data-intensive computational research environments.

Stewards of social science data face a fundamental tension. On one hand, they want to make their data accessible to as many researchers as possible to facilitate new discoveries. At the same time,...

LabKey Server version 18.3.0-61806.763, released on January 16, patches all three issues, so users should update as soon as possible.

Edward Snowden’s revelation about the National Security Agency’s information-gathering practices alerted the public to the nefarious uses of data ...

Scientific Data - The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and...

Contemporary ideas about data and privacy are tied up inextricably with language choices.

This is a post-print of an article in v​olume 14, issue 2 of t​he Journal of Information, Communication, and Ethics in Society. h​ttp://www.emeraldinsight.com/journal/jices

Update, 02 September 2017: An article came out today in a well-known semi-journalistic website, for which I was interviewed. I’d like to be clear that this piece dramatically misrepresents my…

This article considers digital curation in doctoral study and the role of the doctoral supervisor and institution in facilitating students’ acquisition of digital curation skills, including some of the potentially problematic expectations of the supervisory relationship with regards to digital curation. Research took the form of an analysis of the current digital curation training landscape, focussing on doctoral study and supervision. This was followed by a survey (n=116) investigating attitudes towards importance, expertise, and responsibilities regarding digital curation. This research confirms that digital curation is considered to be very important within doctoral study but that doctoral supervisors and particularly students consider themselves to be largely unskilled at curation tasks. It provides a detailed picture of curation activity within doctoral study and identifies the areas of most concern. A detailed analysis demonstrates that most of the responsibility for curation is thought to lie with students and that institutions are perceived to have very low responsibility and that individuals tend to over-assign responsibility to themselves. Finally, the research identifies which types of support system for curation are most used and makes suggestions for ways in which students, supervisors, institutions, and others can effectively and efficiently address problematic areas and improve digital curation within doctoral study.

Vines et al. ask authors for the data underlying papers between 2 and 22 years old and find that the odds of it being reported extant decrease by 17% for every year since publication.

A recent study by Timothy Vines et al investigated the availability of scientific research data from 516 papers between 2 and 22 years of age1.  They report that the older a paper is, the less likely it is that the data are accessible, with odds of accessible data falling by 17% per year after publication.…