Anita de Waard
Disruptive Technologies Director, Labs
Elsevier
David Marques
Senior Vice President, Research Data Services
Elsevier
Funding agencies are displaying two counteracting trends regarding research data repositories: on the one hand, partly motivated by a need for reproducibility and fear of fraud, funding agencies are encouraging scientists and scholars to make their (raw and summarized) research data available in open, publicly accessible repositories; on the other, they are de-scoping and defunding the maintenance of many well-established data repositories. To address this dichotomy, and the clear and present need for the population and maintenance of open research data repositories, more technically and socially acceptable models of and tools for representing, uploading and storing research data are needed, as are innovative and collaborative business models for maintaining data repositories in a scalable, sustainable way.
Elsevier is interested in exploring novel (open, public access-based) collaborations and business models to address both of these needs, and provide uploading, maintenance and annotation tasks and tools in a service-based model. The company is interested in discussing and exploring the views of the Coalition for Networked Information community regarding the relative role of libraries, data repositories, and publishers to develop an open and sustainable research data infrastructure. Issues to discuss include the development of researcher-controlled distribution of research data, and the assessment of attribution, credit and impact of research data, as well as metadata and archiving standards. This talk will include Elsevier’s thoughts and current projects in this direction and then invite comments and ideas from the community on the practical, philosophical and financial possibilities for publishers and libraries to collaborate on this important and emerging topic.