Researchers struggling to meet new data management requirements from funders, journals and their own institutions now can use the DataUp Web application and a Microsoft Excel add-in to document and archive their tabular data.

“DataUp will change the way scientists do their work, making it easy for them to manage and preserve their spreadsheet data for future use,” said Bill Michener, principal investigator for the DataONE project.

Scientific datasets have immeasurable value, but they are useless without proper documentation and long-term storage. Data sharing also is strongly encouraged in the scientific community but is not the norm in many disciplines, including Earth, ecological and environmental sciences. DataUp addresses these issues.

CDL partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft Research Connections and DataONE to create the DataUp tool, which is free to use and creates a direct link between researchers and data repositories. CDL also announces today that the DataUp project has been contributed to the Outercurve Foundation’s Research Accelerator Gallery.

The DataUp add-in operates within a program many researchers already use: Microsoft Excel. The Web application allows users to upload tabular data in either Excel format or comma-separated value (CSV) format. Both the add-in and the Web application allow users to:

• Perform a “best practices check” to ensure data are well-formatted and organized
• Create standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template
• Retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from their data repository
• Post their datasets and associated metadata to the repository.

Although hundreds of data repositories are available for archiving, many scientific researchers either are unaware of their existence or do not know how to access them. One of the major outcomes of the DataUp project is the ONEShare repository, created specifically for DataUp, where users can deposit tabular data and metadata directly from the tool.

An added advantage of ONEShare is its connection to the DataONE network of repositories. DataONE links existing data centers and enables users to search for data across participating repositories by using a single search interface. Data deposited into ONEShare will be indexed and made available by any DataONE user, facilitating collaboration and enabling data re-use.

“DataUp is uniquely positioned because it improves the quality and documentation of data in Microsoft Excel, the tool of choice for many researchers who would otherwise not participate in data preservation initiatives,” said Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. “Scientific synthesis will benefit tremendously from the infusion of these small but information-rich data sets from Excel into the DataONE ecosystem of shared data.”

CDL envisions the future of DataUp directed by the participating community at large. Interested developers can expand on and increase the tool’s functionality to meet the needs of a broad array of researchers. Code for both the add-in and Web application is open source and participation in its improvement is strongly encouraged.

About the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library

UC3 is a creative partnership bringing together the expertise and resources of the University of California. Together with the UC libraries, we provide high quality and cost-effective solutions that enable campus constituencies — museums, libraries, archives, academic departments, research units and individual researchers — to have direct control over the management, curation and preservation of the information resources underpinning their scholarly activities. For more information, visit www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/.

About Microsoft Research Connections

The program collaborates with and supports the work of the world’s top academic researchers and institutions. It establishes partnerships to advance the state of the art in computer science and develop technologies that fuel data-intensive scientific research. By connecting leading researchers around the world, Microsoft Research Connections aspires to accelerate the scientific discoveries and breakthroughs that respond to some of the world’s most urgent global challenges. Fellowships, grants and awards from Microsoft Research Connections help to inspire the next generation of computer scientists and the broader research community.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The foundation is committed to making a meaningful difference in environmental conservation, patient care and scientific research. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, and his wife, Betty, established the foundation in 2000 to create positive outcomes for future generations. The Moore Foundation focuses on that goal around the world and in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, visit www.Moore.org.

About DataONE

DataONE serves as the foundation of innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyber-infrastructure, meeting the needs of science and society with open, persistent, robust and secure access to well-described and easily-discovered Earth observational data. It is supported by a $20 million award from the National Science Foundation’s DataNet program. With coordination nodes at the University of New Mexico, University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Tennessee, DataONE is a collaboration of universities and government agencies teamed up to organize and present vast amounts of diverse, inter-related, but often heterogeneous scientific data.

About the Outercurve Foundation

The Outercurve Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation providing software IP management and project development governance that help organizations develop software collaboratively in open-source communities for faster results. The Outercurve Foundation is the only open-source foundation that is platform, technology and license agnostic. For more information, contact info@outercurve.org.

Read the UC Newsroom press release.

The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), a partnership to create a distributed retrospective print journal repository in the western United States, has completed its first round of print journal archiving under a three-year program jointly funded by WEST members and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In this first cycle in the 2011-12 academic year, 12 WEST libraries serving as archive holders on behalf of the partnership have archived more than 6,100 journal titles, comprising more than 160,000 volumes. These totals include almost 5,100 titles archived at the Bronze level (no validation; also have digital preservation), more than 500 titles archived at the Silver level (validated for completeness at the volume level) and more than 500 titles validated at the Gold level (validated for both completeness and condition at the issue level).

The WEST validation levels are designed to ensure that library collections are preserved and made available for long-term use by future generations of students and scholars, while investing in archiving efforts appropriate to the level of risk. These WEST archiving commitments have been recorded in the OCLC WorldCat database and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR) using Print Archives Metadata Guidelines developed in conjunction with an OCLC pilot project last year, making this information available in a standardized form to libraries across the U.S.

Building on these archiving commitments, WEST has produced individualized collection comparison reports for most of its members — an important benefit of WEST membership. To aid in making collection management decisions, each member library that provided information about its print journal holdings has received a report listing the titles in its collection that have been archived by another WEST partner library.

WEST also is pleased to welcome eight new members who joined in 2012: California State University – Northridge; New Mexico State University; and, through the consortial membership of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), California Baptist University, La Sierra University, Santa Clara University, University of Redlands, University of San Diego and Whittier College. This brings the total WEST membership to 109 libraries in 18 states, many through consortial partners Orbis Cascade Alliance and SCELC. 

More information about WEST is available at www.cdlib.org/west.

The rapidly increasing volume of environmental and Earth science data — from historic observational field notes to modern satellite imagery, to actively updated remote sensor readings — is challenging scientists to locate and integrate pertinent data in a manner that addresses important questions for science and society. How is the spread of invasive species affected by patterns of land use? What factors predict the distribution of emergent infectious diseases, and what are the associated health risks? Are climate models sufficiently predictive? DataONE addresses these needs by providing a single search interface that federates globally distributed data centers. These centers individually store and manage important digital scientific data holdings, and DataONE now helps these centers preserve the holdings, while enabling scientists around the world to discover and add their own data to them for long-term use and sharing. Research enabled by this widespread access to data will range from illuminating fundamental ecological processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions.

“Science is entering a new era of data-intensive research,” said William Michener, DataONE principal investigator at the University of New Mexico. “DataONE has been built to support scientists in discovering and preserving data and, most importantly, in enabling new scientific discoveries. DataONE is critically needed now to broaden the nature of, and increase the pace of, science as researchers tackle the grand challenges facing science and society.”

DataONE provides users a suite of tools and training materials that cover all aspects of the research data life cycle, from data collection to management, to analysis and publication. 

DataONE offers searchable access to data held by South Africa National Parks, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, the Ecological Society of America, Dryad, Oak Ridge National Laboratories Distributed Active Archive Center, the United States Geological Survey, the Long Term Ecological Research Network, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans and the California Digital Library (CDL).  The CDL, through its University of California Curation Center (UC3), has supported the long-term preservation of the university’s digital assets for over 10 years. While originally focused on the management of cultural heritage materials contributed by campus libraries, archives, and museums, UC3 has seen increasing demands for its preservation services by the social and physical science communities. 

“We view DataONE as the continuation of our longstanding mission to protect and disseminate the university’s scholarly outputs into the scientific disciplines,” said Patricia Cruse, UC3 director. “It complements and augments a number of other important UC3 initiatives in the preservation area.”

More organizations are joining DataONE to make their data accessible. The Earth Data Analysis Center (EDAC) at the University of New Mexico is “an enthusiastic contributing member of the growing DataONE network,” said Karl Benedict, center director. “For nearly 50 years, EDAC has focused on delivering Earth science and other geospatial data and information to diverse end user communities. Participation in the DataONE network provides us with a great opportunity to extend the impact of our data holdings.”  

DataONE is a community-driven organization and the DataONE Users Group provides the opportunity for funders, users, developers, educators, and any other stakeholders to gather and contribute to DataONE products and services. Within, DataONE, experts from library, computer, and environmental sciences can bridge these worlds and provide an infrastructure to serve science for many decades to come.

Another member node soon to be added by CDL and UNM is ONEShare, a special-purpose repository that will accept spreadsheet data from researchers who do not have an explicit affiliation with another existing member node.

“Right now researchers have a hard time even finding the right data to answer complex environmental questions, and when they do, the work necessary to integrate really different types of data can be overwhelming,” said Stephanie Hampton, deputy director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara. “DataONE provides the type of platform we need to propel environmental science into the digital age.”

About DataONE: DataONE is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data. DataONE represents a collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often heterogeneous, scientific data. It is supported by a $20 million award made as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) DataNet program (Grant #OCI-0830944). DataONE features coordination nodes at the University of New Mexico, UC Santa Barbara and University of Tennessee, and member nodes including the California Digital Library,

About the UC Curation Center and the California Digital Library:
The UC Curation Center (UC3) of the California Digital Library (CDL) was established in 2009. UC3 is a central preservation and curation service provider addressing the systemwide needs of the 10 campuses of the University of California, one of the pre-eminent public universities of the world. The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve. For further information contact Patricia Cruse, director, UC Curation Center, at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu or (510) 987-9016.

See also version in the UC Newsroom.

As the scholarly publishing landscape heats up with more talk of boycotts and Open Access mandates, research libraries increasingly find themselves at a crossroads between publishers and faculty — and eagerly working to provide new solutions to entrenched problems.  The California Digital Library’s (CDL) latest foray into this space, on behalf of the University of California system, focuses on supporting open source publishing infrastructure through a major development partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP).

As a result of this agreement, the CDL will assist with PKP’s ongoing development and support of its open source software suite — Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS), and Open Harvester System (OHS), with Open Monograph Press (OMP) due for release in the coming year.

Chuck Eckman, Dean of Library Services at Simon Fraser University stated: “The California Digital Library is widely recognized for its record of innovation and leadership in the domain of scholarly publishing and the SFU Library is thrilled at the prospects this new collaborative venture creates for advancing our shared scholarly communication goals.”  Laine Farley, Executive Director of CDL, noted, “Not only are we extremely pleased with the flexibility afforded by OJS, we are also delighted to join this growing international community and contribute to the future growth of this publishing solution.”

The California Digital Library, in partnership with the University of California campus libraries, supports and encourages open access publishing initiatives within the UC system through its eScholarship publishing and institutional repository platform. eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.  Home to 45 peer-reviewed journals (http://escholarship.org/uc/search?smode=browse;browse-journal=aa), eScholarship has recently transitioned to OJS as its journal management and submission system and has integrated OJS with its pre/post-print, books and working papers repository, which contains more than 45,000 UC-affiliated publications. 

John Willinsky, Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, Library Scholar in Residence and Professor (Limited Term) in Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University, and founding Director of PKP stated: “Given the leadership, innovation, and engagement shown by CDL in moving scholarly communication into a digital era marked by a spirit of greater openness and sharing aimed at the advancement of learning, this partnership provides a wonderful opportunity for PKP to further explore ways that faculty and librarians can work together to make more of what we do more of a public good.”

The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve.  The CDL Publishing Group delivers open access digital publication services to the University of California academic community, supports widespread distribution of UC research materials, and fosters new models of scholarly publishing through the development and application of advanced technologies. (For further information contact Catherine Mitchell, director of CDL Publishing at catherine.mitchell@ucop.edu 510.587.6132.)

PKP is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research.  With more than 11,500 installations of Open Journal Systems (OJS); Open Conference Systems (OCS); and Open Harvester Systems (OHS) around the world, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has proven that open source software can be a game changer in scholarly publishing.

In September 2011, PKP officially launched a major sustainability campaign to ensure the continued development and enhancement of its open source software suite and to provide better support for the growing PKP user community.  To find out more about this initiative and how your site can become a PKP sponsor visit the PKP Web site at http://pkp.sfu.ca.

HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The majority of HathiTrust holdings are in-copyright works, of which an unknown but likely large proportion are so-called “orphans” – works whose owners cannot be identified or located. The University of California will join the effort to identify orphan works and publicize information about them in order to give rights holders an opportunity to claim them and make informed decisions about their availability within HathiTrust. It is likely that many people with these rights wish to make the books fully viewable.

The majority of orphans probably are just that – lacking anyone to claim ownership. If the orphan works are not claimed by rights holders, the digital volumes will be made available in full view to HathiTrust partner library patrons if their libraries hold those works in their print collections.

“This effort promises to expand access to a great number of digitized scholarly works in the UC Libraries’ collections that have previously been hidden from view,” said Laine Farley, executive director of the California Digital Library. “In addition to the more than 2.5 million public domain volumes already available within HathiTrust, this important project will bring a larger percentage of our digitized works directly to our students and faculty in support of their work.” The text of all of the works contained within HathiTrust is fully searchable today, but currently only works in the public domain or works whose copyright holders have given explicit permission can be consulted online in their entirety. The bulk of public domain works are pre-1923 books from the U.S. and government publications.

About the University of California libraries
More than 100 libraries on the 10 University of California campuses support the university’s research, learning, patient care and public service missions. Collectively, they make up the largest research/academic library in the world and, with the California Digital Library, have taken the lead to harness technology in support of innovative forms of scholarly communication. To date, the UC Libraries have digitized more than 3.5 million volumes in their collections. For more information, visit http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu.

About HathiTrust
Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership, currently comprising more than 50 partner libraries. Over the last three years, the partners have contributed more than 9 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections through various means, including Google and Internet Archive digitization and in-house initiatives. More than 2.5 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web. For more information, visit http://www.hathitrust.org/about.

The partners in this project include the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library, the UCLA Library, the UCSD Libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Virginia Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, DataONE, and the United Kingdom’s Digital Curation Centre (DCC). 

By joining forces the partners expect to consolidate expertise and reduce costs in addressing data management needs.  The primary goal of the partnership is to simplify the process of creating plans while increasing the quality of decisions made by funders to pre-define policies and infrastructures that support research activities.   CDL Executive Director, Laine Farley stated, “This tool will streamline UC faculty’s ability to produce a credible and high-quality plan for managing data.  An important consequence of that is the general raising of awareness about the services that libraries provide in data curation.” 

The tool for generating data management plans (DMP) will be based on DMP Online, a software tool developed by the DCC and designed to accommodate different funder requirements; this function will be tested by tailoring it to the requirements of US research funding agencies and the institutions they fund.  It will be publicly available, allowing researchers at all institutions to initiate a data management plan quickly and provide answers to various data management questions relating to their research, such as how data will be documented throughout the research project and made available for public use and potential secondary uses, how data quality will be assured, data backup procedures, and preservation plans.  The tool will make the entire process easier, less expensive, and more consistent in moving research data management forward at the national and international levels.  It will also aid institutions in identifying associated costs and in future resource planning.  The new version of the DMP is expected to be available within the next several months.

Kevin Ashley, DCC director, stated, “Research is an international activity, and data management planning is also international in scope. Funders around the world already require such plans with grant applications or as a condition of funding; many more are planning to do so. The DCC is pleased to be part of this work to develop planning tools that also have international utility and relevance.”

In fiscal year 2010, the University of California received more than $498 million in research funds from the NSF alone, so the potential impact of the data management requirements on researchers is enormous. 

James Carey, Professor of Entomology at University of California, Davis said, “Thanks to […] the UC Curation Center I am confident that the section in my proposal on data management that we submitted last week will not only impress the reviewers of our grant proposal (which of course we hope to get funded), but also enlighten them and the program officers about UC’s leadership in data management and curation. All of my colleagues from the other institutions involved in our research program were impressed with (not to mention jealous of) the help we are receiving form UC3.”

The press release can also be found at the UC Newsroom: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/24992

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of California Libraries a three-year grant to support implementation of the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), a distributed shared print repository program for retrospective journal archives.  Twenty libraries and library consortia participated in the planning phase, including libraries from the University of California system, Stanford University, Arizona State University, the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, other members of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC).  More than 60 additional academic libraries have expressed an intention to join the project as it moves into implementation.

Under the WEST program, participating libraries will consolidate print journal backfiles at major library storage facilities and at selected campus locations.  Planning partners developed an operating and business model including 1) selection priorities based on risk-management principles, 2) standards for validation, holdings disclosure, access and retention, and 3) a governance model and sustainable financial plan to share costs.

During the initial three-year project (Phase 1), selected WEST “Archive Builders” will actively process approximately 150,000 volumes from 8,000 journal runs (current and previous titles), to allow recovery of the space occupied by potentially millions of corresponding volumes now held  in duplicate by partner libraries.  WEST partner libraries agree to maintain WEST collections for a period of 25 years (through 2035) and to review the agreement to continue to build the archives every 5 years.

An Executive Committee composed of representatives from member institutions will oversee the operation and development of WEST.  The California Digital Library (CDL) at the University of California will serve as Administrative Host for the WEST program.  Primary project staff includes Lizanne Payne (WEST Project Manager) and Emily Stambaugh (CDL Shared Print Manager and Assistant WEST Project Manager).

The outcome of the WEST project will be a robust framework developed and adopted by a variety of partners in the region to support a long-term, distributed print repository. The program will make the archives and retention commitments visible at the national/international level.

 See the UC Newsroom press release.

California Digital Library Publishing Group Director Catherine Mitchell sees local publishing services as key for universities to reclaim their primary intellectual asset – the scholarly output of faculty.

By getting involved in the publishing process early on, as the researchers are creating work rather than after the fact, Mitchell believes that universities and their libraries can better support and drive the creation, preservation, and dissemination of scholarship.

“Despite the daunting complexity of the task, universities must take responsibility for managing their own scholarly output,” says Mitchell, “or risk losing control of that core intellectual property.”

At an OCLC Symposium on the Future of Publishing at the American Library Association’s annual conference in June 2010, Mitchell presented an overview of “The University as Publisher: Our Value/s, Ourselves” (http://vidego.multicastmedia.com/player.php?p=akz63449), outlining the University of California’s University as Publisher initiative.

At the heart of UC’s initiative is UC Publishing Services (UCPubS). A collaboration between the California Digital Library (CDL) and the University of California Press, UCPubS provides a suite of open access digital and print publishing tools to UC centers, institutes, and departments that produce scholarly books. Using a shared resource model, UCPubS enables its publishing partners to focus on scholarship, while UC Press and CDL’s eScholarship handle distribution, sales, and web platform development.

UCPubS not only allows these academic units to take control of their publishing processes, but also enables the work published through the CDL and UC Press to reach a worldwide audience, enhancing the University of California’s standing as a top-tier educational institution.

Read more about UC’s University as Publisher initiative in NextSpace, the OCLC Newsletter: http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/016/1.htm.

The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve.

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly digital publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

University of California Press, is among the six largest university presses in the United States and, of these, is the only one located in the West and associated with a public university.

Follow eScholarship on Facebook and Twitter.

One of today’s most important priorities for academic scholarship and research is providing long term access to datasets. Data are now seen as the building blocks of scholarship and research in the sciences and humanities. Scholars and archivists recognize the potential for increasing collaboration and synthesis when data are archived, published, and shared, forging the possibility for new discoveries built upon the research of others.

To facilitate the sharing of datasets, the University of California’s California Digital Library (CDL) has become a founding member of the international DataCite consortium, a group of leading academic and scientific memory institutions providing data publishing opportunities for researchers lacking appropriate publication channels and incentives for their datasets.  

See the press release from the UC Newsroom at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/23055

Researchers worldwide will soon have access to previously inaccessible collections of documents, photographs, and other rich archival materials related to California’s environmental history.

CDL’s Digital Special Collections Program, in partnership with nine California institutions, has been awarded a competitive grant to catalog thirty-three collections documenting a range of important issues—including irrigation, mining, forestry, agriculture, industry, land use, activism, and research—in the state’s environmental history. Until now, these collections have been effectively hidden to researchers who have not known of their existence or contents.

Highlights from the collections include the corporate records of Unocal, a major oil company; the papers
of Frank Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel-prize winning scientist who discovered the effects of CFCs on the
ozone layer; the records of prominent California leaders in the Sierra Club; and materials on the state’s
tidelands controversy, with a complete environmental profile of Los Angeles Harbor.

Scholars in California and beyond are excited about the many research possibilities that the collections hold. “They will shed light on the interdependence between nature and culture in California’s recent environmental past,” says Professor John Mack Faragher of Yale University.

The CDL will collaborate with the following institutions to arrange and describe the collections for scholarly use, then make the records available online in the Online Archive of California
(http://www.oac.cdlib.org/) and library catalogs:

• California State University, Chico
• California State University, Fresno
• Humboldt State University
• UC Berkeley
• UC Davis
• UC Irvine
• UC Los Angeles
• UC Riverside
• University of Southern California

The project is particularly exciting because it is a collaborative effort across universities to uncover a bulk of material. While each institution will independently undertake the cataloging work, CDL will host tools,
training, and a virtual meeting space to promote the exchange of ideas and advance the archival profession’s approach to uncovering hidden collections.

The Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and administered by Council for Library and Information Resources, totals $446,817. More information about the grant is available at http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/index.html.