ORCID Scoping Study Report

You can now read the final public report of the ORCID Scoping Project, a University of Oxford internal project funded by the Research Information Management and Technology Sub-Committee and led by the Bodleian Libraries. The report aims to summarise the current state of the ORCID environment in the UK and more widely, with reference to research carried out over the past four months, with a view to providing a series of recommendations for further investment in ORCID-related activities at Oxford.

However, through working with other institutions and other ORCID stakeholders during the project it became apparent that the findings and conclusions in the report would be valuable to the wider ORCID community and it was therefore decided to release a version more widely.

With thanks to colleagues in collaborating institutions, Jisc, ORCID and many other bodies (listed in the appendices), the report is attached.

– Neil Jefferies

Research Uncovered— Digital Hermeneutics and Cross Platform Research: Walking to the Theatre in Shakespeare’s London

BOOK FREE TICKETS!

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF VENUE: WESTON LIBRARY LECTURE THEATRE.

ThomasDabbsWhat: Digital Hermeneutics and Cross Platform Research: Walking to the Theatre in Shakespeare’s London

Who: Thomas Dabbs

When: 13.00—14.00, Thursday 1 September 2016

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: all are welcome

Admission: free

Booking: registration is not required but is advisable to ensure your place

By exploring the cross-platform interoperability of new or relatively new digital projects in development, this talk will present a street view of theatre routes that London playgoers walked before and during the Shakespearean period. It will examine the physical environs experienced while ambling to the theatres inside and outside the city and also probe into another crucial walk, the stroll through the St Paul’s precinct.

The nave of St Paul’s, then called Paul’s Walk, and the bookshops of Paul’s Cross churchyard instantiated, by a type of cultural accident, a general centre for hearing the news and, for readers, the gateway to remaining au courant. Walking and browsing in this area was something of a prerequisite for playgoers and, for playwrights, a locale where one could hear what was on the buzz and also a reservoir from which to cull material for successful plays.

There have been a number of recent and fines studies connecting London city life with the early modern theatre. This talk will examine how digital initiatives may advance this field by offering more insights into theatre going and into how plays were fashioned for then current audiences by Shakespeare and other playwrights.

Thomas Dabbs is a professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, where he has taught Shakespeare and the English Bible since 2003. Prior to this Dabbs taught at Hiroshima University. He is the author of Reforming Marlowe: the Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist and Genesis in Japan: The Bible beyond Christianity. His recent research and publication focuses on the St Paul’s cathedral precinct in early modern London and the impact of this area on Shakespearean drama. He is a native of the state of South Carolina in the USA.

Access: If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

You can download a flyer for this talk.

Value, metrics and action in publishing data

The funding community and other proponents of Open Science and Open Data have been trying to persuade the mainstream research community to publish their data for some time with only partial success [1].

A key problem is that, although the arguments for doing so are logical – research becomes more reproducible, data can be cited and re-used, opportunities for cross-domain cooperation are increased, and so forth – concrete underlying evidence has until recently been in quite short supply, with a resulting lack of engagement from the wider research community.

It’s been possible to argue for a while that linking an open dataset to a primary publication is correlated with increased citation rates (of up to 30%) [2]. But this still doesn’t draw attention to the dataset itself. Researchers are busy and need to optimise their behaviour towards activities that will drive their research field, departments, institutions and personal career progress and to date the proactive management, deposition and publication of their data has often simply not been a logical priority.

With Giving Researchers Credit for their Data we’re hoping to lower the barrier to action by automating and simplifying the process of submitting data papers to journals. The carrot of having a publishable, citable product at the end of the process is also part of the value proposition. And the proposition itself has been strengthened in recent weeks by the news of the data journal Earth System Science Data’s high citation rates. ESSD has been assigned an Impact Factor over 8, leapfrogging its primary research competitor titles to achieve a ranking of 2nd in Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, and 3rd in Geosciences, Multidisciplinary.

Whilst it can rightly be argued that the Impact Factor is a blunt instrument at best with which to measure the value of individual articles, this announcement does imply that researchers use and credit data papers in their work at levels comparable to, or exceeding, many traditional research articles (at least in Geosciences). Perhaps this development will lead to ‘write my data paper’ making its way on to the standard academic To Do list.

And that is certainly worth celebrating!

-Neil Jefferies (PI for Giving Researchers Credit for Their Data)

 

Giving Researchers Credit for their Data, funded as part of the Jisc Data Spring Initiative, aims to provide a button that can be added to a DataCite compliant data repository which largely automates the process of data paper submission for an authenticated researcher. The project uses a cloud-based app and SWORD2-based APIs to link with multiple repositories and publishers, taking advantage of existing DataCite and ORCID metadata so that a paper can be automatically inserted into a publisher’s submission system without requiring any data re-entry by the author.

References:
[1] Aleixandre-Benavent, R et al. Scientometrics (2016) 107: 1. doi:10.1007/s11192-016-1868-7
[2] Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. (2013) Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ 1:e175 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.175. This analysis specifically concentrated on micro-array data.