Monthly Archives: August 2010

Science Online in London

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If you’re in London this week, don’t miss Science Online London on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 3-4.   Hosted by the British Library, Mendeley, and Nature, this meeting is an opportunity not just to listen but to connect, engage, and interact.

Stop by the British Library booth to find out more about Dryad’s expansion under the new JISC grant involving Oxford University and BL.

Meeting topics include:

  • How is the web changing the way we conduct, communicate, share, and evaluate research? How can we employ these trends for the greater good?
  • How is the internet changing the way we work with data?
  • How are blogs and social networking facilitating scientific discussion? What challenges do we face?
  • What challenges and opportunities are there when engaging with the public?

In particular, these sessions on Friday may be of interest to those involved in data sharing:

  • Breakout 1: Publishing primary research data
  • Breakout 8: Connecting scientific resources

Follow the conference on Twitter @soloconf (comment with hashtag #solo10).

Proteomics journals mandate data sharing

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Several journals in the field of proteomics have decided to mandate data sharing at the time of publication. These journals are leading the way toward data sharing out of a conviction that “the provenance of data sets and their proper citation is central to the research process,” as described in a recent commentary in Bio-IT World,  Share the Data: Making Large-Scale Proteomics Data Widely Available.

Mass Spectrometer, photo from U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs

Now “authors who publish a manuscript containing mass spectrometry data in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (MCP) must submit the raw data to a publicly accessible site.”   The journal Proteomics also requires data deposit in a public archive.

There are several specialized data repositories in the field, and several are working together as ProteomExchange “to provide a single point of submission to proteomics repositories, and encourage the data exchange and sharing of identifiers between the repositories so that the community may easily find datasets in the participating repositories.”

Dryad goes international

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Science is international.  Science publishing is international.  And so it stands to reason that science data repositories should be international as well.

We are pleased to report that the Joint Information Science Committee (JISC) in the UK has made an award to the Dryad project through its Managing Research Data Program.  Through this program, JISC seeks to ” fund projects to explore and pilot innovative technical and organizational models for enhanced research data publications… to stimulate the better management, more open sharing and easier reuse of research data.”

The UK partners in the project include Oxford University and the British Library (BL), with participation from the Digital Curation Centre, Charles Beagrie Ltd, and a number of major scientific publishing houses. The director of the project, Dr. David Shotton at Oxford, heads the Image Bioinformatics Research Group (IBRG) at Oxford, and has been a leader in the application of Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance biological research data and publications.

The project will result in a UK mirror of the Dryad repository based at the BL, improve the tools available for the publication and citation of data, expand the disciplinary range of participating journals (particularly into epidemiology and infectious diseases), and further develop the business framework for an international organization dedicated to long-term data preservation.

The proposal (PDF here) emerged out of a Dryad-UK discussion meeting cosponsored by the Research Information Network, and held in London in April 2010.