Following the closure of the Jisc Innovation Support Centre on 31 July 2013, UKOLN has entered a new phase. As part of this, the UKOLN Web site is being archived, meaning that its contents will be available long into the future but will no longer be updated.
The project-based activities of UKOLN continue under the name UKOLN Informatics, for which a new web presence is being prepared. More information is available in a statement from Director Liz Lyon on the UKOLN Web site.
Slides are now available from the presentation given by Liz Lyon entitled Data Publishing: Challenges for HEIs and Libraries at the Symposium “The Now and Future of Data Publishing” held at St. Anne’s College, Oxford on 22 May 2013. Liz’ presentation was a contribution under the panel “Citation, Impact, Metrics”. The Symposium was organised by the Jisc Managing Research Data Programme in conjunction with a range of partners including BioSharing, DataONE, Dryad, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, Wiley-Blackwell, and others.
The Community Capability Model (CCM) team at UKOLN and Microsoft Research has recently submitted its Working Group Case Statement (in draft form) to the Research Data Alliance and it is now available from the Research Data Alliance Forum pages.
The Statement explains the CCM Working Group Charter, and in the subsequent Value Proposition details the beneficiaries together with the varied impacts and outcomes of the Working Group. It goes on to describe how the WG will engage with existing work and lists final deliverables and milestones by way of greater detail and includes its Adoption Plan. You are invited to comment on the Case Statement on the Forum and it will be presented at the forthcoming RDA Launch in Gothenberg later this month.
Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Associate Director, DCC will give a presentation entitled Roadmaps, Roles and Re-engineering: Developing Data Informatics Capability in Libraries at the LIBER 2013 Conference to be held in Munich over 26 – 29 June.
In this presentation, Liz will reflect on the strategic and operational approaches to developing sustainable research data management services within institutions. Her perspective will draw on the work of the UK Digital Curation Centre in supporting universities addressing the data challenge through the provision of tools, guides and training resources. She will also share experience and findings from the Research360 Project and the innovative Immersive Informatics training programme at the University of Bath. Throughout the talk, the drivers, barriers and opportunities for libraries will be highlighted, unpacked and critically assessed, with a particular focus on requirements for new data scientist roles and associated informatics skills, to support multi-disciplinary data-intensive research and open science.
The first Director of UKOLN, Philip Bryant, has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Senate of the University of Bath for his significant contribution to the development of bibliographic management at the University. Read more in a news feature available on the UKOLN Web site.
UKOLN has welcomed the announcement of the launch and first plenary meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), an organisation that supports research data sharing and exchange. The purpose of the Research Data Alliance is to accelerate international data-driven innovation and discovery by facilitating research data sharing and exchange, use and reuse, standards harmonisation, and discoverability. This will be achieved through the development and adoption of infrastructure, policy, practice, standards, and other deliverables.
As “big data” achieve international importance, the RDA has issued an open invitation to all interested parties to its first plenary, entitled Open Access Research Data without Barriers, to be held over 18-20 March 2013 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The RDA will be launched by sponsors from the European Commission, the US Government and the Australian Government, and by leaders in the data community. The Plenary will be a working meeting to accelerate discussion, Working and Interest Group interaction, and data community development.
Confirming her own attendance at the RDA’s first plenary meeting, Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, remarked, “As the importance of careful management of Big Data becomes increasingly evident, the appearance of the Research Data Alliance on the scene after just a few months of start-up activity can only be regarded as lending further support to the essential task of institutions worldwide in their role as stewards of large-scale data.”
The work of the Research Data Alliance will primarily be undertaken through its working groups. Participation in working groups, starting new working groups, and attendance at the twice-yearly plenary meetings is open to all.
Liz Lyon will be taking part in a panel on open data entitled ‘Reasserting the primacy of data’ during the 10th anniversary conference of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) in Brussels on 30 November 2012. The theme of the special conference is Open Horizons: A Revolution in Open Science.
LERU was founded in 2002 as an association of research-intensive universities sharing the values of high-quality teaching in an environment of internationally competitive research.
Liz Lyon and Kenji Takeda gave a presentation entitled What is a Data Scientist? to the recent Microsoft eScience Workshop in Chicago in which they explained about the Community Capability Model Framework, funded by Microsoft Research. The Framework has attracted considerable interest including from the US NSF EarthCube initiative in its recent document EarthCube Roadmap. Slides from Liz and Kenji’s presentation to the Workshop are now available from the UKOLN Web site.
Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Kenji Takeda of Microsoft Research will give a presentation entitled What Is a Data Scientist? at the forthcoming Microsoft eScience Workshop 2012. The ninth annual Microsoft eScience Workshop will be held over 8 and 9 October at the Hyatt Regency Chicago in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on eScience 2012. Discussions and presentations will once again relate to the theme of eScience in Action. Each year, the workshop provides a forum for scientists and researchers to share their experiences and expertise with the academic and research communities.
Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre, has been invited by the Modern Universities Research Group (MURG) to give a presentation in the Data Usage for Research strand of its forthcoming workshop whose theme is “Catapult Centres, Local Enterprise Partnerships, Data Usage for Research” on 28 September 2012 at Goodenough College, London.