Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Who’S Got The Data? Interdependencies In Science And Technology Collaborations, Christine L. Borgman, Jillian C. Wallis, Matthew S. Mayernik

Christine L. Borgman

Science and technology always have been interdependent, but never more so than with today’s highly instrumented data collection practices. We report on a long-term study of collaboration between environmental scientists (biology, ecology, marine sciences), computer scientists, and engineering research teams as part of a five-university distributed science and technology research center devoted to embedded networked sensing. The science and technology teams go into the field with mutual interests in gathering scientific data. “Data” are constituted very differently between the research teams. What are data to the science teams may be context to the technology teams, and vice versa. Interdependencies between …

So You Want To Be A Publisher: Planning And Publishing The Journal Of Escience Librarianship, Raquel Abad, Sally A. Gore, Donna Kafel, Elaine Russo Martin, Lisa A. Palmer, Mary E. Piorun

Lisa A. Palmer

Objective: To describe the planning process and activities of the University of Massachusetts Medical School's Lamar Soutter Library around the publication of the new Journal of eScience Librarianship (JESLIB).

Methods: The University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library through funding from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine has been a leader in educating librarians about eScience and its impact on librarianship. In spring 2011 the Library began to explore the idea of publishing a peer-reviewed, open access electronic journal about eScience and data management for librarians. Planning and implementation considerations included: choosing a unique and appropriate name; infrastructure …

Reproducibility: Gold Or Fool’S Gold In Digital Social Research?, Christine Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Data sharing has become a core tenet of science policy in the U.K., U.S., and elsewhere. Among the rationales for sharing data is improving the ability to reproduce or to replicate research. Reproducibility is an oft-stated “gold standard” for science, yet it is a problematic rationale for sharing research data. Sociologists of science have described the difficulties of verifying, let alone reproducing, scientific results, since the 1970s. While most sciences are experiencing a data deluge, the characteristics and practices associated with data vary widely, with different requirements for replication. Reproducibility concerns underlie peer review, identification of fraud, bio-security, and publication …

Dataone: Facilitating Escience Through Collaboration, Suzie Allard

DataONE Sociocultural and Usability & Assessment Working Groups

Objective: To introduce DataONE, a multi-institutional, multinational, and interdisciplinary collaboration that is developing the cyberinfrastructure and organizational structure to support the full information lifecycle of biological, ecological, and environmental data and tools to be used by researchers, educators, and the public at large.

Setting: The dynamic world of data intensive science at the point it interacts with the grand challenges facing environmental sciences.

Methods: Briefly discuss science’s “fourth paradigm,” then introduce how DataONE is being developed to answer the challenges presented by this new environment. Sociocultural perspectives are the primary focus of the discussion.

Results: DataONE …

Understanding Escience: Reflections On A Houston Symposium, Joanne V. Romano, Allen Lopez, Maianh Phi

Library Staff Publications

EScience is a research methodology combining data collection, storage and networking on a massive scale. By its very nature, eScience presents new and diverse opportunities in librarianship. While various academic institutions such as Cornell, Georgia Tech, and the University of Massachusetts are already engaged in well-established projects at their libraries, eScience is still relatively new to many others. To explain eScience and its implications for medical librarians within the Texas Medical Center, The Texas Medical Center (TMC) Library hosted an event on February 13, 2012, called Understanding eScience: A Symposium for Medical Librarians.

Funded in part by the National …