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Archiving webpages – securing the digital discourse
We are having discussions around Cambridge about the research activity that occurs through social media. These digital conversations are the ephemera of the 21st century, the equivalent of the Darwin Manuscripts that the University has spent considerable energy preserving and digitising. However, to date we are not currently archiving or preserving this material. As a starting point, we are sharing here some of the insights Dr Marta Teperek gained from attending the DPTP workshop on Web Archiving on 12 May 2015, led by Ed Pinsent and Peter Webster. Digital dissemination Increasingly researchers are realising that online resources are important to disseminate their findings – the subject of our recent blog ‘What is ‘research impact’…
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Joint response on the draft UK Concordat on Open Research Data
During August the Research Councils UK on behalf of the UK Open Research Data Forum released a draft Concordat on Open Research Data for which they have sought feedback. The Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford prepared a joint response which was sent to the RCUK on 28 September 2015. The response is reproduced below in full. The initial main focus of the Concordat should be good data management, instead of openness. The purpose of the Concordat is not entirely clear. Merely issuing it is unlikely to ensure that data is made openly available. If Universities and Research Institutes are expected to publicly state their commitment to the Principles…
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Data sharing – build it and they will come
If a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to hear it, did it happen? You could ask the same philosophical question of research – if no-one can see the research results, what was the point in the first place? Moving science forward and increasing the knowledge of the world around implies exchange of findings. Society cannot benefit from research if there is no awareness of what has been done. Managing and sharing research data is a fundamentally important part of the research process. Yet researchers are often reluctant to share their data, and some are openly hostile to the idea. This blog describes the research data…
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Interview with Nigel Shadbolt on The Life Scientific
Sir Nigel Shadbolt was interviewed on ‘The Life Scientific‘ this morning on BBC Radio4 about open data. The general discussion ranged from his background and what got him interested in this area. The data being discussed is more about government public data (such as medical information or cyclist black spots) than that generated in research projects, but an interesting conversation nonetheless. A couple of items that jumped out to me: 16:50 – When we talk about data, really we are talking about information … Data and information and knowledge are kinda different and mostly when we talk about open data we are talking about information. Data (such as a number) only becomes information if it is…
