In This Issue

• Mark Hahnel on Why figshare Loves SHARE
• Rick’s MetaTips: It’s All about the Links
• SHARE Gains Eight Metadata Providers, Tracks 2.5 Million Research Releases
• SHARE Logo Wins Design Award
• IMLS, Sloan Foundation Jointly Award ARL Grant to Expand and Enhance SHARE
• Catch SHARE at the Charleston Conference on November 6
• Learn More about SHARE

Mark Hahnel on Why figshare Loves SHARE

Mark Hahnel, figshare

The SHARE team recently asked Mark Hahnel, CEO and founder of figshare, to talk about how he sees SHARE as complementary to figshare, which is a large, open, digital repository and a data provider to SHARE Notify. In response, Mark wrote a lovely fan letter to SHARE:

figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable, and discoverable manner. figshare allows users to upload any file format to be made visualisable in the browser so that figures, data sets, media, papers, posters, presentations, and file sets can be disseminated in a way that the currently dominant scholarly publishing model does not allow.

One of the biggest questions people ask us at figshare is, “What’s so special about open research data, with the coming open data mandates?” Meaning we are now talking about “when” not “if” the majority of academic outputs will live somewhere on the open web, so the big question now becomes, ”What next?” With fantastic initiatives such as Data FAIRport looking at the technical needs for optimizing data reuse, it is obvious that there are still a fair few hurdles to making open data easily findable and reusable.

Through the power of linked open data, the web should evolve in order to return more accurate data in response to any question. As the world’s largest driver of knowledge, the academic system should provide new ways for researchers to query and consume content. In order to do so, the world’s repositories need some common application programming interfaces (APIs). This is where SHARE is making huge strides, by pulling together data sets from many of the world’s most-used repositories, such as figshare. In turn, SHARE’s aggregating of data sets can feed discovery of content in sites that may not have the same exposure as figshare or discovery of data from across disciplines. By notifying current and future generations of academics of content in their space and beyond, the knowledge around the need for data sharing can only grow.

These are the reasons we at figshare are so thankful for SHARE and the innovative systems being built through it to move research and academia forward.

Search or browse our free, open data set of 2.5 million research releases to discover new research in your space and beyond.

Rick’s MetaTips: It’s All about the Links

Rick Johnson, image courtesy of University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries

In this new series, Rick’s MetaTips, SHARE visiting program officer Rick Johnson provides advice on how to make your research—whether it’s your own, your institution’s, or your repository’s—more visible through SHARE by improving your metadata.

This month’s tip applies primarily to current or prospective providers of metadata to SHARE Notify, but probably includes some useful information for anyone hosting research content online. Because SHARE does not host any content itself, its data set is only as good as the links to content provided by its sources. Many links, even within the most stable organizations, can degrade over time: site URLs may change, underlying architectures can shift, and in the worst case content could disappear altogether. Therefore, persistent links are preferred for any linked resources in SHARE.

What makes persistent links different from other URLs or uniform resource identifiers (URIs)? The creator and maintainer of a persistent link commits to maintaining the link forever no matter what happens to the content the link references. Two common implementation schemes for persistent links are persistent URLs (PURLs) and digital object identifiers (DOIs).

Read all about how to implement PURLs and DOIs to make your research more discoverable and usable over the long term in the first installment of Rick’s MetaTips: “It’s All about the Links.”

SHARE Gains Eight Metadata Providers, Tracks 2.5 Million Research Releases

SHARE search page

Adding new metadata providers gives SHARE Notify a more diverse and inclusive set of data about research release events around the world. This month we welcome eight new research metadata sources:

• Chapman University Digital Commons
• CiteSeerX Scientific Literature Digital Library and Search Engine
• Digital Commons @ Kent State University Libraries
• DSpace@Cambridge
• Huskie Commons @ Northern Illinois University
• Research Online @ University of Wollongong
• Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange
• UKnowledge @ University of Kentucky

SHARE Notify has captured almost 2.5 million research release events, and is adding more every day.

If you would like to make your organization’s publications, data, repository holdings, or other research discoverable via SHARE, register to become a metadata provider or forward this e-mail to your digital repository manager and ask them to register.

To find new research and potential collaborators, visit the SHARE search page.

SHARE Logo Wins Design Award

The Davey Awards honor small design and marketing agencies that have big ideas, but not enormous budgets. These design awards are judged by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, whose members include design and marketing executives from Disney, Condé Nast, MTV, and Microsoft, among others. The SHARE logo was created last fall by Fearless Future and won a Silver Award in the 11th Annual Davey Awards this year. Congratulations and thank you to Fearless Future for designing such a terrific logo for us!

IMLS, Sloan Foundation Jointly Award ARL Grant to Expand and Enhance SHARE

The SHARE team is thrilled that the Association of Research Libraries has been awarded a joint $1.2 million grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to expand and enhance SHARE’s open data set of research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. (The Association of Research Libraries manages SHARE in collaboration with the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Center for Open Science.)

SHARE is an open source project to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. The initiative is accomplishing its mission by collecting data that describes and links to research outputs from many digital sources, and by providing a feed, a search box, and a common application programming interface (API) for people to access the research in real time. SHARE includes data about research grant awards, publications, reports, data sets, data management plans, software code, and more.

There are two primary elements of SHARE’s Phase II, which will run through early 2017. First, the project team will conduct investigations with several research universities about the value and challenges of tracking and reporting their research activities. At the same time, the team will increase the quantity of sources coming into the SHARE data set, and add or impute missing elements (e.g., author identifier, institution, funding agency) to improve the quality of the data set.

Many people and organizations benefit from a timely, connected data set of research events—including universities, researchers, funding agencies, libraries, repositories, publishers, and the public. Making the data set open for reuse means that anyone can use it to address a multitude of needs, from tracking the outputs of particular projects to sharing research more widely to innovating and collaborating.

Read more in the press release about the grant award.

Catch SHARE at the Charleston Conference on November 6

image © Charleston Conference

At the upcoming Charleston Conference on book and serial acquisition, Judy Ruttenberg and Sara Bowman will present on SHARE and the Open Science Framework. Their presentation will cover ways that libraries and publishers can participate in developing and benefit from an open data set about research activity, and contribute to open practices that benefit the research community.

Don’t miss the SHARE presentation if you are attending the Charleston Conference—next Friday, November 6, 3:30–4:15 p.m. EST, in Grand Ballroom 1 of the Gaillard Center. Follow tweets from the conference with hashtag #chs15.

Learn More about SHARE

SHARE Knowledge Base

There is a wealth of resources to help you better comprehend and communicate the ins and outs of SHARE as we build a free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle:

• Flyer about SHARE—to help you spread the word about the growing SHARE data set and the opportunity to register for SHARE Notify. Please reproduce and distribute this flyer on your campus or at meetings you attend.
• FAQ about SHARE Notify Beta—If you have questions about the SHARE Notify beta, such as, “How do I subscribe to SHARE notifications?” or “How do I filter my SHARE search results by institution?”, visit the FAQ for answers. Submit additional questions to info@www.share-research.org.
• SHARE Knowledge Base—provides short, non-technical answers to key SHARE questions ranging from “Who is behind SHARE?” to “What is SHARE doing about data?” If you or someone on your campus has a practical or conceptual question about SHARE, the Knowledge Base is likely to have your answer.
• EDUCAUSE Review article on SHARE—Tyler Walters and Judy Ruttenberg describe SHARE’s first project, the SHARE Notification Service (now called SHARE Notify), as well as the other three layers of SHARE that will be developed in tandem with the Notification Service: a distributed content and registry layer, a discovery layer, and a content-aggregation layer that moves beyond curation and discovery to facilitate data and text mining.
• SHARE on the Open Science Framework—Technical developments pertaining to SHARE Notify are discussed and tracked in real time on the Open Science Framework. The SHARE Open Science Framework site includes a list of active notification sources and consumers, as well as information regarding prototypes, APIs, and other key issues. The site is open and welcomes public input.

Acknowledgments

SHARE is supported in part by generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

A wide array of stakeholder organizations endorse SHARE’s goals. If you would like to add your organization to our list of stakeholders, please e-mail info@www.share-research.org.

Comments, Questions, Conversation

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