Last Friday, along with Philippa Broadley (Research Data Librarian, Queensland University of Technology) and Marianne Brown (Data Collections Specialist, James Cook University), I attended a meeting of the Research Support Working Party of the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation (QULOC). The working party have themed discussions at their regular meetings and this time around the topic was acquiring datasets for repositories, something that Philippa, Marianne and I all have experience with.

The discussion was very wide-ranging. Philippa provided a great overview of QUT's multi-pronged approach to identifying datasets, which includes:

• Meetings between senior Library staff and senior research leaders
• Outreach programs by liaison librarians, including attending departmental meetings
• Newsletter articles
• Building relationships with key research facilities, at point of establishment or at other critical times (e.g. a storage migration project)
• A new ANDS-funded collaborative project with a spatial data focus, involving QUT's Institute for Future Environments as well as Queensland Government's Department of Natural Resources and Mines
• Monitoring users of high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure at QUT
• Monitoring QUT users of QRISCloud, the Queensland node of the Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) and the national research cloud provided by the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR)
• Analysing reports from the publications repository (QUT ePrints) to identify willing depositors as well as publications that have been deposited with supplementary data
• Contacting users of QUT's online survey service.

I made a couple of other suggestions including:

• Seeking access to, or reports from, your Research Office's grants management system, e.g. of recently completed or about-to-be-completed projects
• Using these reports to target researchers directly through emails and follow-up calls
• 'Snowballing' i.e. asking every researcher you are dealing with if she/he can recommend anyone else for you to talk to
• If the library is publishing open access journals or monographs, offering the ability to publish supplementary datasets through the repository
• 'Repatriating' metadata from external repositories to ensure that datasets are part of the institutional record. 

Marianne's approach included some of the strategies noted above, but with a strong focus on linking data collection identification and acquisition with efforts to improve research data storage (as this is usually the researchers' most urgent need). Marianne also highlighted one of the benefits for researchers in linking from their institutional repository to an externally published dataset, which is that institutional repositories often feed the researcher profile system. 

Other themes that emerged from the discussion included:

• The importance of automating data capture into repositories from data management solutions such as survey tools, electronic lab notebooks, and scientific imaging hardware such as microscopes, and the role that librarians can play in this, including metadata mapping and advice about licensing
• Metadata being 'fit for purpose' in terms of identifying a dataset and its location as a minimum, rather than always needing a perfect full description
• Aligning with changes in scholarly publishing such as the recent PLoS data policy and the emergence of data journals
• The importance of short-term initiatives that focus on manual workflows for populating repositories with final state data as well as longer term strategies to build sustainable services that focus on earlier stages in the research lifecycle.

This was a really great session to attend and gave me some new ideas to put into practice at my own institutions. Thank to all involved for the chance to be part of it. 

One of the things I've done today is write a short piece on data journals (reproduced in its entirety below) for our Information Services (INS) online newsletter, INSight. 

INSight is published monthly by our division's Communications team; all university staff receive it as an email as well as being able to access it via the web. As a channel, I've found it a really useful way to get important updates about data management out to a big chunk of the university community. Through the magic of web analytics, we know that INSight is opened by almost 50% of the people who receive it; this is far above the 'open rate' of around 20% for newsletters like this, which is a testament to our Comms team's expertise and hard work. (Be kind to your Comms people because they can do things that you might find difficult, like source professional images to accompany stories and write snappy headlines that make people actually want to read your stories about data management rather than poke their own eyes out.)

Research data advocacy is a never-ending task, so I always look for opportunities to get word out through as many channels as possible using the least amount of resources. This single piece of content has now been repurposed in at least four different ways. 

1. Initially I decided to send an email to the team leaders of two of our Academic Services Groups (Health and Sciences) within Library and Learning Services about the release of the new data journal from Nature.
2. I did this knowing that these team leaders regularly make written and verbal reports to meetings of the Group Boards (senior management of the faculties), and asked them to include this in their reports. On reflection, I realised that many researchers might be unaware of the emergence of data journals. I re-wrote my initial email to include more contextual information and links to key resources, such as a list of available data journals and an ANDS guide. 
3. By broadening the scope of the story in this way, it then become a piece suitable for inclusion in INSight for all university staff. 
4. And here it is again on this blog, for the small but passionate crowd interested in the point where data and libraries meet. 

Do you make the most of the content that you write by re-purposing it for different outlets and audiences? Are you aware of all the channels that are available in your organisation, and do you have good relationships with the editors/owners of those outlets? If not, I highly recommend this as a sanity-saving strategy.

Data journals represent an exciting new trend in scholarly publishing and provide an opportunity for researchers to formally publish (and potentially be rewarded) for their research data outputs. While traditional journals often include datasets only as supplementary materials, data journals focus on research datasets as important outputs that can be re-used and cited in their own right.

In 2012-2013, the Peer Review for Publication & Accreditation of Research Data in the Earth Sciences (PREPARDE) project collated a list of around thirty data journals across a range of disciplines, mostly in the sciences.

The most recent data journal to be launched comes from the well-known Nature Publishing Group. Scientific Data is an open-access, peer-reviewed outlet for articles that describe important scientific datasets. These articles, called data descriptors, are described as “a new category of publication designed to provide detailed descriptions of experimental, observational, computational or curated data." Scientific Data does not host the datasets, which must be submitted to an appropriate external repository. Approximately sixty data repositories in life sciences, biomedicine and environmental sciences are currently recommended and this is likely to expand in future. The FAQs provide more information about submission and peer review processes, publication charges, and licensing options.

Data journals have different policies and requirements for submission, review, and data hosting. INS can help researchers identify data journals that might be suitable, and can provide advice on institutional and discipline repository options. To find out more about data journals, contact the Library Specialists for your academic group.

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) also has a useful Data Journals Guide for researchers and information managers.

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) recently announced some changes to its data policy that immediately affected authors submitting manuscripts to any of the PLOS suite of high profile journals. From 1 March 2014, authors must submit a data availability statement. Unless exceptional circumstances apply, the data that supports the findings in an article must be made publicly available under conditions no more restrictive than a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY).

I don't intend to discuss the mixed responses that the PLOS announcement generated: Carly Strasser's blog post, Lit Review: #PLOSFail and Data Sharing Drama, provides an excellent overview if you are interested in this. Rather, I want to talk about how this policy change represents an opportunity to raise awareness amongst researchers of institutional infrastructure (such as repositories that can be used to publish data) and advisory services.

When I first read the announcement, my initial thought was that I needed to find out which Griffith researchers had already published in PLOS (on the assumption that if they've been published there before they might try there again). I wasn't sure of the extent to which our researchers may have targeted PLOS previously and following on from that, what the likely impact of the PLOS changes would be at our institution.

It turns out that PLOS is a significant publisher of Griffith research. Over the time period since 2000 (when PLOS began), more than 200 Griffith-affiliated authors published more than 200 papers in PLOS journals. This represents about 2.3% of the Griffith journal articles published in that time period; PLOSOne was the journal with the fourth highest number of articles by Griffith researchers. This was far more than I was expecting! On an annual basis, this could translate into a pretty substantial number of supplementary datasets that need to be made openly available as per the policy. Even if our researchers are depositing elsewhere in subject repositories (which seems likely, given the subject areas the PLOS journals cover), we'd still like to be capturing metadata for them locally so that they appear in researcher profiles in the Griffith Research Hub and can be harvested by our national registry, Research Data Australia.

I've been thinking that a 1-2 pager (possibly accompanied by the PLOS FAQs) on what this means for Griffith researchers could be prepared quite quickly. This could go out to the Research Committee meetings of our four Academic Groups (particularly the Health and Science groups), to the directors and managers of our research centres and institutes by email, and to the research community as a whole through our Information Services newsletter and university-wide fortnightly Griffith News email. It would be good to work on this in partnership with our Office for Research and we'd probably need to cover:

• what the changes are
• how those changes will directly affect researchers, and
• what relevant support the University has in place, including institutional repositories and Digital Object Identifier (DOI) minting, and advice on subject repositories.

One of the things I'm not sure about is whether to focus just on the PLOS changes or more generally on journal policies for data sharing. Our team (eResearch Services) has already been contacted by a researcher from our Institute for Glycomics about the policy change at PLOS. Coincidentally, only a week later a similar request came through from a researcher in another institute targeting a Nature Publishing Group journal. Like PLOS, NPG's data policy has significantly changed in recent times. At Griffith far fewer researchers have published in NPG journals than in PLOS journals (about a quarter of the number noted above) but maybe it still warrants a mention? Or should we be looking at the overall findings of the JISC-funded Journal Research Data Policies Project (JoRD) and coming up with a broader message for researchers around shifts in the publishing industry, rather than focusing on specific journals?

It seems likely that these policy changes will spark new conversations with some of our top researchers. How is your institution responding to these policy changes by the publishers? Will you highlight these changes through direct communication with your researchers, or will you respond on demand as researchers become aware of new requirements at the time they are submitting? Do you think there is greater benefit in highlighting the policy changes of specific journals, or in promoting more general trends in scholarly publishing, including the emergence of data journals? I'd love to hear how others plan to respond.