In This Issue

• Theses and Dissertations Gain Visibility and Context through SHARE
• How Easy Is It to Register as a SHARE Data Provider?
• SHARE Gains 8 Metadata Providers, Tracks 3.5 Million Research Releases
• New Journal to Publish Stand-Alone Scientific Observations
• Brian Nosek Named a 2015 Influencer by Chronicle of Higher Education
• Learn More about SHARE

Theses and Dissertations Gain Visibility and Context through SHARE

image CC-BY-NC-ND by GARNET

There has been a lively discussion on the American Library Association SCHOLCOMM Discussion List in the the past few weeks about how higher education institutions are handling electronic deposit of theses and dissertations—namely, whether graduating students are required to submit their completed work to ProQuest or the university institutional repository, or are given choices. Central to these discussions on campus, and in the library community, is the university’s responsibility to archive its graduate student work, the accessibility of the work, and its discoverability.

We are gratified to see a trend toward the institutional repository as the entity universities are naming to collect, preserve, and provide access to university work, including graduate student work. At the Association of Research Libraries, SHARE is aggregating metadata about research activity across the life cycle from institutional, disciplinary, and other digital repositories. In a free, open data set like SHARE, theses and dissertations in institutional repositories can be linked to subsequent work by early career scholars, and to networks of mentors and collaborators.

SHARE continues a long-standing commitment of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to making graduate scholarship widely discoverable and accessible, beginning with the ARL-sponsored index American Doctoral Dissertations. By including theses and dissertations in SHARE, ARL is once again helping universities provide a single comprehensive access point for finding and accessing the unique and rich scholarship held in graduate works. And the work that SHARE is currently doing to enhance its metadata will provide the additional benefit of linking theses and dissertations to related works.

Read more in the full article by Gail Peretsman-Clement of Caltech Library and Judy Ruttenberg of the Association of Research Libraries.

How Easy Is It to Register as a SHARE Data Provider?

Video: How to register as a SHARE data provider

In this 90-second video, SHARE partner Center for Open Science developer Fabian von Feilitzsch demonstrates how easy it is to have links to your organization’s publications, data, repository holdings, or other research included in the SHARE database and notification service. Help more people find your institution’s research and scholarship—register to become a SHARE data provider today.

SHARE Gains 8 Metadata Providers, Tracks 3.5 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:

• Addis Ababa University Institutional Repository
• DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska–Lincoln
• Digital Repository @ Iowa State University
• EngagedScholarship@CSU, Cleveland State University
• Speech and Language Data Repository (SLDR/ORTOLANG)
• US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Material Measurement Laboratory Repository
• VCU Scholars Compass, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Washington State University Research Exchange

SHARE Notify has captured more than 3.5 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.

New Journal to Publish Stand-Alone Scientific Observations

Matters journal

An open access journal, Matters, was launched in November with the intention of raising the integrity and speed of scientific publishing by accepting single observations rather than full stories. The “Why Matters” page on the journal’s website reads, “Observations, not stories, are the pillars of good science. Today’s journals however, favor story-telling over observations, and congruency over complexity. As a consequence, there is a pressure to tell only good stories. Moreover, incentives associated with publishing in high-impact journals lead to loss of scientifically and ethically sound observations that do not fit the storyline, and in some unfortunate cases also to fraudulence. The resulting non-communication of data and irreproducibility not only delays scientific progress, but also negatively affects society as a whole. Here at Matters, we publish the true unit of science, the observation.”

A recent Science magazine article about the new journal notes that some worry that publishing single findings will lead to increased fragmentation of scientific communication, a problem arising from the professional incentive to publish as many articles as possible. As Center for Open Science executive director Brian Nosek points out in the Science article, SHARE can help solve this issue of fragmentation by linking “findings, studies, protocols, data, and other parts of the research life cycle.”

Brian Nosek Named a 2015 Influencer by Chronicle of Higher Education

Brian Nosek, photo by Casey Templeton

The Chronicle of Higher Education selected Brian Nosek, executive director of SHARE partner Center for Open Science, as one of ten influencers who “shook up higher education in the classroom, on campus, and beyond” in 2015. Nosek was chosen for founding and leading the Reproducibility Project, which systematically tried to replicate the findings of 100 studies published in three top psychology journals and was able to reproduce only 39 of them. The Chronicle notes that Nosek “forced a reckoning with deep problems in science.” As one way of tackling this issue, he and colleagues recently published findings from an experiment that shows that scientists do well at predicting which studies will not be replicable and therefore should be scrutinized more rigorously.

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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