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October 2nd, 2013
February’s executive memorandum from the Office of Science and Technology Policy required over twenty federal agencies who have annual research and development budgets of more than $100 million to submit plans to the White House to ensure that “the direct results of federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.” This includes openly and freely sharing the publications that result from sponsored research as well as datasets. Purdue and the Libraries have supported this new policy and helped to inform its development.
The goal of the memo is to ensure that data that are produced with federal funds are made as available as possible for access and reuse by other researchers as well as the general public. Some agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health already require data management plans and have been encouraging data-sharing for years. Datasets such as spreadsheets, instrument and sensor data, software source code, transcripts, images and video, and the other “raw ingredients” of research need to be shared in order to reproduce experiments and validate their findings. Efficiency is gained by reusing instead of reproducing the same data in different studies, and new discoveries and economic opportunities can be created.
What does it mean for researchers on our campus? In practical terms, our researchers will be required to submit data management plans with their grant proposals to the major federal funding agencies. The agencies will be required ensure the evaluation of the merits of the data management plans, including how well the researcher identifies and describes what data will be produced by the research and how the data will be made accessible and preserved.
Since the establishment of the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) by the Libraries in 2006, we have been preparing to help our researchers meet these requirements. In collaboration with the Office of the Vice President of Research and Information Technology at Purdue, the Libraries launched the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR, http://purr.purdue.edu) to give researchers a platform for collaborating and publishing and archiving their data. We have been involved in the creation of solutions such as the DMPTool (http://dmptool.org) that walks a researcher through the process of writing an effective data management plan, step-by-step. Purdue is also a founding member of DataCite (http://datacite.org), which is an international organization to assign unique, globally resolvable digital objects identifiers to datasets and promote the scholarly use and attribution of data in research.
Most importantly, our subject-specialist librarians are advocates, consultants, and collaborators in research data management, helping to write and review plans, working with faculty and students to understand issues related to data use and stewardship, and contributing as co-principal investigators on sponsored, data-intensive research.
As many of the parties involved in this new policy work on drafting potential solutions, the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has offered their proposed policy solution. Published in June of 2013, the Shared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE model, proposes that academic universities and libraries are well suited as a solution to the new OSTP policy requirements due to their long standing history of investing into the services, tools, and infrastructure to support the dissemination, access, and preservation of research. One of the key components to the infrastructure of this model that universities already have in operation is institutional repositories, such as Purdue e-Pubs (http://purdue.edu/epubs). Institutional repositories, including Purdue e-Pubs, are poised to play an important and significant role in the continued discussions on these new funder requirements, and the promotion of scholarship and research by Purdue faculty, staff, and students.
Established in 2005, Purdue e-Pubs is the open access institutional document repository of Purdue University providing free and open access to research and scholarship authored by members of the Purdue community. Submitting work to Purdue e-Pubs is open to anyone affiliated with Purdue, and can serve the public deposit requirements for any Purdue Principal Investigator (PI) on federally funded research projects. Once the work has been uploaded to the repository many of the services, tools, and infrastructure currently in place in Purdue e-Pubs are poised to fulfill several components of the policy’s requirements. After an item is deposited, Purdue e-Pubs makes the metadata and full text submission of the work available to commercial search engines, such as Google Scholar, and other discovery systems through the implementation of the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It is also at this time that the repository will create within the metadata a link to the publisher’s version of the work through the creation of an Open URL. Purdue e-Pubs also belongs to a cross-institutional repository system, the Bepress Digital Commons Network (http://network.bepress.com/). The Digital Commons Network is a federated institutional repository-based discovery tool aggregating works from over three hundred institutional repositories. Built upon the Bepress institutional repository platform, Digital Commons, the Digital Commons Network further illustrates solutions to the OST memorandum’s accessibility requirements.
There are also several methods to ensure compliance with using the Purdue e-Pubs repository and other institutional repositories as components to the new policy requirements. Upon submission and final deposit of a work an automated notification is currently sent to all authors. This automated notification could be potentially sent to other designee’s including the author’s institutional research offices, the publisher of the work, and to the funding agency to ensure notification and compliance with the new policy. Authors currently also receive an automated monthly email informing them on the industry recognized COUNTER (http://www.projectcounter.org/) compliant download statistics. These download statistics, as well as the access and site statistics from Google Analytics and altmetrics, could also be supplied to administrators and other invested parties by Purdue e-Pubs and its additional services.
At the time of this publication, the federal agencies have turned in their plans to the White House, which will review and respond to them over the course of the next six months. Because of our involvement and early engagement in issues related to research data management, Purdue is prepared and equipped to meet these new funder requirements and promote the research of our faculty and students through global data-sharing and reuse.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter