In This Issue

• Matt Mayernik on Linking Research across Repositories with SHARE
• Rick’s MetaTips: SHARE Metadata Is Stitching Together the Research Life Cycle
• SHARE Gains 12 Metadata Providers, Tracks 3 Million Research Releases
• Catch SHARE at Coalition for Networked Information in December
• Learn More about SHARE

Matt Mayernik on Linking Research across Repositories with SHARE

Matt Mayernik, NCAR / UCAR Library

The SHARE team recently asked Matt Mayernik, project scientist and research data services specialist in the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Library, to talk about a project NCAR is working on, using SHARE Notify to link research objects across different repositories. Matt said:

The open availability and wide accessibility of scientific articles, data sets, and other digital resources is becoming the norm for science. Growing numbers of repositories of scientific resources enable researchers to discover, understand, and build upon previous work at greater scales than was previously possible. An ongoing challenge for digital repositories, however, is in identifying and leveraging relationships among materials in separate repositories. Many interrelationships exist among research articles, data, software, and other services used to produce scientific findings. Repositories for these resources, however, typically only support one particular kind of resource, or at most a couple of resource types, such as data and software. This has led to the siloing of information in a vast number of repositories. Producers and users of scientific resources would benefit from a more coherent web of repositories, in which repositories with different specializations and user communities work together at a technical and process level to provide greater services than any one repository can provide.

The US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is investigating the SHARE Notify service as a tool that can help repositories of related materials to interact, in a project titled “Repository Cross-Linking for Open Archiving and Sharing of Scientific Data and Articles.” The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Open Access and Open Data initiative as an Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). I am a co-principal investigator on this project with Don Middleton, also of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). EAGER awards support exploratory work on untested research ideas or approaches that have the potential for significant impacts. The focus of our project is to develop a pilot demonstration of how repository interconnections can be built among related resources (e.g., data, software, services, publications). The repositories at the center of the project are the NCAR Library’s OpenSky repository and the Earth System Grid (ESG), which is operated by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Lab.

The project is developing cross-links between these two systems to: (1) exchange information about relationships among existing resources, and (2) allow researchers who deposit resources in one system to initiate the deposit of related resources in the other. Our end goal is to make links among related resources visible in the respective systems in a seamless and straightforward fashion. In scoping the project development work, it became clear that a notification service was a key necessary functionality. SHARE Notify provides a third-party service for creating notifications of research release events. We hope to use SHARE to send notifications of relationship “events,” for example, if article “A” hosted in the OpenSky repository is based on data set “B” hosted by the Earth System Grid. The project is investigating the flexibility of the SHARE metadata model and notification feeds for this purpose. Ultimately, we hope to inform the development of metadata and workflow processes for creating a connected web of scientific information and data repositories.

Look for news about this exciting project in future SHARE Updates.

Rick’s MetaTips: SHARE Metadata Is Stitching Together the Research Life Cycle

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

In this 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 answers the four questions the SHARE team hears most often when repository managers or others inquire about becoming SHARE data providers:

1. What metadata fields are most important for SHARE?
2. Do I need to write software to plug into SHARE?
3. If I am using OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) how does that map to SHARE?
4. How do I get started with SHARE?

Rick answers these questions in the context of how metadata relates to SHARE’s mission of making research more accessible, discoverable, and reusable as well as tracking research across its life cycle to show its impact.

Read all about the importance of metadata for SHARE and how easy it is to get started as a SHARE data provider in Rick’s MetaTips: “SHARE Metadata Is Stitching Together the Research Life Cycle.”

SHARE Gains 12 Metadata Providers, Tracks 3 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 12 new research metadata sources:

• Deep Blue at University of Michigan Library
• DukeSpace at Duke University Libraries
• Earth System Grid at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Érudit
• Ghent University Academic Bibliography
• Lake Winnipeg Basin Information Network
• London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Research Online
• Mason Archival Repository Service at George Mason University
• NeuroVault
• Springer
• US National Centers for Environmental Information at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• US National Institutes of Health (NIH) ExPORTER 

SHARE Notify has captured 3 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.

Catch SHARE at Coalition for Networked Information in December

image CC-BY-SA by Wyn Van Devanter

SHARE Operations Team members Rick Johnson, Judy Ruttenberg, Jeff Spies, and Tyler Walters will all be attending the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2015 Membership Meeting on December 14–15 in Washington, DC. They would love to talk with you about SHARE. Send us an e-mail at info@www.share-research.org to arrange a time to talk or grab Rick, Judy, Jeff, or Tyler at the meeting.

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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