SHARE Update, January 2016

In This Issue

Rick’s MetaTips: SHARE Looking Back, and Forward into 2016
NCAR/UCAR Library Convenes Workshop on Linking Across Repositories
SHARE Gains 10 Metadata Providers, Tracks 4.25 Million Research Releases
Join Free ASERL Webinar on SHARE Friday, January 29, 2:00 PM EST
Help SHARE Enhance Its Data Set at FORCE2016 Conference in Portland
Learn More about SHARE

Rick’s MetaTips: SHARE Looking Back, and Forward into 2016

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

by Rick Johnson, SHARE Visiting Program Officer

Heading into the new year, it is a good time to pause and reflect on the past year, and look forward to what lies ahead. In 2015, SHARE launched the public beta of SHARE Notify, which generates a feed of research release events—such as posting a preprint to a disciplinary repository, depositing a data set into a data repository, publishing a peer-reviewed article—from diverse sources. By the end of the year, the SHARE Notify database included more than three million research releases contributed by 77 data providers. This is a tremendous step forward as the SHARE team continues to add research releases and new registered sources. This progress is also the result of contributions from so many people both within the SHARE team and community working groups in the first two years of this initiative.

Now with renewed SHARE funding from IMLS and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced in October, we are excited to head into 2016 focused on the next step towards realizing our vision for SHARE to maximize research impact by making it more accessible, discoverable, and reusable. The theme for the new year is enhancing the critical mass of metadata created through Phase I of SHARE by adding or imputing missing elements and linking related objects, and therefore improving the accessibility and reusability of research content.

Looking first at reusability, in order to plug past research into future data-driven work it is vital to capture information (i.e., metadata) about what conditions and methods (i.e., scientific workflow) produced the data. In turn, as SHARE utilizes the Open Science Framework (OSF), a big area of exploration this year will be connecting SHARE to complementary workflow tools within the OSF. The OSF actively links research project data storage and data analysis tools. Using the OSF’s models for captured metadata at data creation—thereby establishing a provenance for research data—will give a deeper view into the research life cycle.

Accessibility and discoverability is really about researchers identifying resources relevant to their research questions. This includes identifying potential collaborators as well as publications and data. For example, a social scientist studying occurrences of a particular behavioral trait could benefit from working with a computer scientist studying new sequencing and pattern-matching methods within sample sets. Look for the SHARE team to continue working with communities like VIVO to correlate researchers with the scholarly activity being aggregated by SHARE.

Finally, a major emphasis for SHARE this year will be forging tighter connections with professionals at research institutions through activities like our expert curation and metadata associates programs, in order to enable direct contributions of authoritative metadata. Our exploratory interviews with The Ohio State University, UC San Diego, and Virginia Tech will further inform our strategies to utilize the research being tracked by SHARE both at a local institution and wider community level.

SHARE is thankful for its many partners, contributors, and supporters—past and present!

NCAR/UCAR Library Convenes Workshop on Linking Across Repositories

Matt Mayernik, NCAR / UCAR Library

On January 5, the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Library hosted a workshop in Washington, DC, to investigate how repositories of related research materials can interact to provide even further benefit to users. Project scientist and research data services specialist in the NCAR/UCAR Library Matt Mayernik presented his work using SHARE Notify to link research objects across different repositories (PPTX).

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 network 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.

In addition to Mayernik’s work with SHARE Notify, workshop presentations included information about CHORUS, DataCite, Dryad Data Repository, and several other approaches.

This event was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Open Access and Open Data initiative as an Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). Mayernik is a co-principal investigator on the “Repository Cross-Linking for Open Archiving and Sharing of Scientific Data and Articles” project with Don Middleton, also of NCAR/UCAR.

View meeting notes and slides on the workshop page of the NCAR/UCAR Library wesbite.

SHARE Gains 10 Metadata Providers, Tracks 4.25 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 10 new research metadata sources:

SHARE Notify has captured more than 4.25 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.

Join Free ASERL Webinar on SHARE Friday, January 29, 2:00 PM EST

Judy Ruttenberg (left), Cynthia Hudson-Vitale (right)

In a one-hour webinar today, January 29, at 2:00 p.m. eastern time, SHARE Operations Team members Judy Ruttenberg and Cynthia Hudson-Vitale will provide an update on the development of SHARE. This webinar—offered by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL)—is free and open to all.

Register for the webinar to learn the latest on SHARE’s progress and how you can participate in and benefit from the project. Ruttenberg and Hudson-Vitale will cover the what, why, and how of SHARE as an open source and higher education effort to build a free, open data set of research and scholarly activity across the life cycle. SHARE is addressing institutions’ need for data about their own activities, and libraries’s mission to collect, provide access, and preserve those activities.

After the webinar, the video will be freely available on the ASERL webinar archive.

The SHARE team plans to offer similar webinars to other groups. Send e-mail to info@www.share-research.org if you are interested in scheduling a webinar.

Help SHARE Enhance Its Data Set at FORCE2016 Conference in Portland

image CC-BY-NC-ND by sama093

SHARE is offering a preconference workshop and a curate-a-thon on Sunday, April 17, in Portland, Oregon, at the FORCE2016 Conference organized by FORCE11, which aims to improve knowledge creation and sharing by encouraging better use of new technologies.

To maximize use of the data SHARE is aggregating about research releases, community involvement and contribution is essential to enhance the highly variable metadata associated with scholarly and research activity, to link objects together as part of the same activity, and in the process to promote innovative scholarship and a range of outputs beyond traditional publications. Join us for this workshop and curate-a-thon to help enrich the SHARE data set.

From 1:30 to 5:00 p.m. on April 17, SHARE Operations Team members Cynthia Hudson-Vitale, Judy Ruttenberg, and Jeff Spies will lead a workshop on “Putting the FORCE11 FAIR Principles into Practice: A Community Curation of SHARE.” Participants will help prioritize the linked data and curation possibilities of the SHARE data set as they relate to the FORCE11 community and the FAIR principles to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

Following a conference reception, the SHARE team will host a curate-a-thon from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. in which participants will enrich the SHARE data set and implement many of the metadata priorities discussed earlier in the day. Participants will learn how to access data using application programming interfaces (APIs), integrate information and data sets using IPython/Jupyter and other tools, and create links between related digital objects using a newly launched curation tool for SHARE.

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

Wide community input is vital for the success of the SHARE initiative.

We are always looking for volunteers for future participation.