Academic Publishing, European Commission Publishing Platform, Featured, Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, open access

Fitting the mould – What the European Commission’s second tender for an Open Research Publishing Platform tells us about the future of scholarly communication

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The European Commission recently announced a second tender for its Open Research Publishing Platform, a venture designed to meet the publication requirements of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funded research and to provide an open publishing venue for all interested researchers. In this post Bianca Kramer analyses what changes to the tender might mean for a future European Commission publishing […]

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ARDC, Australia, CSIRO, Data Management Planning, DCC News, DMP, DMPonline, QCIF, RDA, UQRDM

DMP inspiration down under

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I’ve had a number of inspiring DMP discussions over the last few weeks, both Australian and European based. Here in Oz, funders do not require data management plans like they do in the UK and USA. This has led to the growth of quite different tools as institutions fit the DMP to local priorities.
 
CSIRO, QCIF and the University of Queensland all have data management tools with a strikingly similar feature set. Research Data Planner, RedBox and UQ Research Data Manager are more akin to data management systems than DMP tools. They integrate with other institutional systems and prioritise storage allocation, metadata capture and data publishing as incentives to engage researchers. It’s heartening to see that they have learned lessons from overseas – much attention has been given to streamlining questions and providing tailored guidance or pre-filled answers. This point came up at Macquarrie University too which is currently developing a DMP tool and will provide default answers that should suit most use cases. They are focusing on sensitive data as that’s the biggest risk and institutional concern. Indeed, institutions here seem very risk adverse and defensive of IP.
 
This prevailing institutional competitiveness is a weakeness for the data management field in my opinion. Three teams have developed very similar DMP tools while the sector as a whole would have been much better served by a coordinated national effort. Admittedly this is easier to say than do. Parallel DMPonline and DMPTool developments ran in the UK and USA for nearly 6 years before we started the DMPRoadmap partnership to have a common open source codebase from which to run each of our services.
 
Australian DMP tools are very impressive and there are a lot of ideas I plan to take back to inform DMPonline developments. I really like the API plug and play approach to allow organisations to join up whatever systems they have in place. I hope to coordinate a co-located workshop during the RDA Plenary on 18-20 March 2020 in Melbourne to discuss global DMP initiatives and what opportunities there are for wider collaboration. These could be around the common standard for DMP, sharing user requirements, code, developer peer exchange, training or more. If you are involved in DMP work and want to get involved please reach out to me.
 
There have been interesting European DMP talks over the last few weeks too. Benjamin Faure and colleagues at DMP OPIDoR in France have made a number of useful extensions to the DMPRoadmap codebase. These include one click plan creation from the public templates page, an API extension to pull out themes, and adding a dataset component to the underlying data model. We have also continued our DMPonline outreach, running drop-ins and scheduling the next user group for 17th September in London. This will follow a full day RDMF on costing data management on 16th at the British Library – register here. We are also growing the DMPonline team and held interviews for a new developer on Monday.
 
I’ll be giving a DMP webinar for ARDC on lessons from Europe tomorrow. Slides are available and a video is forthcoming. 
 
 

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Uncategorized

Announcing the ArcLight Phase II work cycle kickoff

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August 19, 2019

by Mark A. Matienzo

Last week, contributors from five institutions – Stanford University, Duke University, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Princeton University – kicked off a collaborative nine-week work cycle for ArcLight. The work cycle, which runs from August 13 to October 11, 2019, will build on the ArcLight MVP implementation from 2017, and focuses on refining ArcLight’s usability and accessibility, addressing strategic needs in a community-based project. Major areas for this work cycle include:

  • Usability and accessibility refinements, including potential design changes
  • Revamping the tools used for indexing archival description into ArcLight’s Solr index
  • Analysis and implementation supporting better integration with request management systems, digital object viewers, and more

You can follow our work on the #arclight channel on the Code4Lib Slack team or the GitHub project board for the current work cycle. We expect to release public demo videos on YouTube, and will share them on Slack as well as the arclight-community Google Group to report on our progress. The work cycle’s conclusion coincides with the 2019 Blacklight Summit, to be held in Durham, North Carolina from October 9-11.

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Early career researchers, Featured, Fund raising, Grant Capture, Higher Education, Research funding, Research policy

Reflections on academic fundraising: the art of getting there

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Fundraising, or grant capture, has become an increasingly established part of a career in the social sciences. Whereas, in the UK this process has become institutionalized, in other research systems grant capture remains less central. In this post Abel Polese reflects on his own experiences of academic fundraising and argues that for researchers seeking research funding, failure is relative and […]

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