This fall (2013), the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), DataONE, and approximately two dozen other organizations endorsed a “Call for Change” to recognize and fund domain repositories as the essential piece of the U.S. research infrastructure that they are. Key portions of the Call for Change are excerpted below (the full text, including signatories) is available at the ICPSR web site; see http://tinyurl.com/dataarchives):

The last few years have seen a growing international movement to enhance research transparency, open access to data, and data sharing across the social and natural sciences. Meanwhile, new technologies and scientific innovations are vastly increasing the amount of data produced and the resultant potential for advancing knowledge. Domain repositories — data archives with ties to specific scientific communities — have an indispensable role to play in this changing data ecosystem. With both content-area and digital curation expertise, domain repositories are uniquely capable of ensuring that data and other research products are adequately preserved, enhanced, and made available for replication, collaboration, and cumulative knowledge building. However, the systems currently in place for funding repositories in the US are inadequate for these tasks. Effective and innovative funding models are needed to ensure that research data, so vital to the scientific enterprise, will be available for the future. Funding models also need to assure equal access to data preservation and curation services regardless of the researcher’s institutional affiliation. Creating sustainable funding streams requires coordination amongst multiple stakeholders in the scientific, archival, academic, funding, and policy communities.

Value and Role of Domain RepositoriesDomain repositories in the social and natural

sciences each serve a scientific community, whether it be a traditional academic discipline, a subdiscipline, or an interdisciplinary network

of scientists, united by a common focus. This in-depth knowledge enables domain repositories to enhance the data ecosystem far beyond data preservation and access. By combining domain-specific scientific knowledge, expertise in data stewardship, and close relationships with scientific communities, domain repositories accelerate intellectual discovery by facilitating reuse and reproducibility, ultimately building an enduring record that represents the richness, diversity, and complexity of the scientific enterprise.

Far from simply storing digital data, domain repositories can use these relationships to:

• Manage data in a way that maintains its understandability and usability for the scientific community

• Facilitate data discovery and reuse through the development and standardization of metadata

• ProvideAccess while ensuring necessary protections related to confidentiality and intellectual property

• Create systems that facilitate future archiving (active data curation) while research is undertaken

• Respond to the unique and evolving needs of scientific communities and other stakeholders

• Partner with each community to create guidelines for data stewardship throughout the data life cycle

• Advocate for transparency, data access, and data sharing

• Innovate in the realm of data curation to address new and evolving forms of data

• AddValue through the creation of data products that align with best practices and new technologies

• Collaborate with related disciplines to achieve interoperability across scientific communities

• Mediate between scientific communities and digital libraries and archives to implement the latest developments in information science

Sustaining Domain Repositories for Digital Data: A Call for Change

Volume 2 Issue 1

©2013 DataONE 1312 Basehart SE University of New Mexico Albuquerque NM 87106

The ChallengeDespite the growing demand for data

sharing and access, domain repositories face an uncertain financial future in the United States. The need for data archives is rising due to open access mandates, research innovations, and the growing volume of scientific data that needs to be curated, preserved, and disseminated. Yet funding for domain repositories remains unpredictable and inadequate for the task at hand. Of particular concern is the mismatch between the long-term commitments to preservation inherent in the work of archiving, and the short-term and episodic funding upon which this work is based. Many archives rely primarily on project-based grants, even though the expectation of stakeholders is that data will be available and usable indefinitely.

Another concern is that the push towards open access, while creating more equity of access for the community of users, creates more of a burden for domain repositories because it narrows their funding possibilities. Without care, this may create a different kind of inequity-- less well-funded scholars or institutions will be less likely to have their products of research preserved for the future.

A Call for ChangeDomain repositories must be funded

as the essential piece of the U.S. research infrastructure that they are. This means:

• Ensuring funding streams that are long-term, uninterrupted, and flexible

• Creating systems that promote good scientific practice

• Assuring equity in participation and access.

There may not be one solution to the problem — repositories may very well need different funding models across domain and repository type. But in every case, creating sustainable funding streams will require the coordinated response of multiple stakeholders in the scientific, archival, academic, funding, and policy communities. n

— Bill MichenerProject Director, DataONE

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WorkingGroupFoCus Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR)

The number of citizen science/public participation in scientific research (PPSR) projects has exploded over the past two decades. These projects collect data for multiple scientific purposes, including basic research, ongoing monitoring, and applied resource management. Projects vary in scale in terms of geography--from local to global—and in time, from short-term projects to projects that have been under way for more than a century.

The goal of the DataONE Citizen Science/PPSR working group is to identify the scope, scale, and diversity of PPSR data used in

scientific research along with barriers to broader use of the data they generate. We also provide recommendations and tools for improving the quality, quantity, and accessibility of PPSR data and for advancing integration of PPSR data into conventional science.

It’s important to understand that our working group is one of many groups striving to achieve similar goals for the PPSR field. Being part of the DataONE project, which has given us the opportunity to meet in person twice annually, has provided the opportunity to achieve significant networking and coordination across the field, as most of our

cont’d page 3 ›››

members are deeply involved in one or more PPSR leadership roles.

For example, many members of our group were deeply involved in organizing, hosting, and making keynote presentations at the first open PPSR conference, held in Portland, OR, August 4-5, 2012. As examples, Bill Michener provided one of our opening keynote addresses on “Grand Challenges and Big Data,” Greg Newman discussed specific challenges of designing data management systems for PPSR projects, and Andrea Wiggins gave an overview of PPSR data management practices.

Most members of our group also were authors in a landmark PPSR publication, a special issue of Frontiers in Ecology focused on citizen science (http://www.esajournals.org/toc/fron/10/6). Together we contributed multiple articles including three that described 1) the history of citizen science, 2) contributions of citizen science to ecology, and 3) future directions for the field.

More recently, our working group published two guides to help professionals in the PPSR field develop and implement PPSR projects: (1) Data Management Guide for PPSR and (2) Data Policies for PPSR: A Primer. The latter was authored by our summer intern, Anne Bowser. Currently we are translating both guides into interactive formats for publication on the Web and are preparing a paper based on the Data Management Guide for submission to an academic journal.

Our two biggest projects currently under way include the preparation of a paper identifying core characteristics of PPSR projects that yield significant scientific outcomes and the development of a core data exchange standard for sharing PPSR project-related data and associated datasets.

The paper identifying characteristics of successful projects should be a major contribution to the PPSR field. Several members of our group already have contributed to the Citizen Science Toolkit (www.citizenscience.org), which offers best practices in citizen science project design, but this paper will provide specific examples of best practices for obtaining robust scientific outcomes through a case study approach that will highlight many of the projects run by our working group members.

Members of the DataONE Team will be at the following events. Full information on training activities can be found at bit.ly/D1Training and our calendar is available at bit.ly/D1Events.

Oct. 16-18 CASRAI: Reconnect Big Data 13 Ottawa, Canada http://reconnect.casrai.org/

Oct. 28-30 EUDAT Rome, Italy http://www.eudat.eu/2nd-conference

Oct. 28 - Nov. 1 TDWG 2013 Annual Conference Florence, Italy http://www.tdwg.org/conference-2013/

Nov. 4-8 GLEON Bahía Blanca, Argentina http://www.gleonrcn.org/index.php?pr=GLEON_15

Nov. 19-22 Metadata and Semantics Research Conference Thessaloniki, Greece http://mtsr2013.teithe.gr/

Nov. 20-22 Open Data in Biodiversity and Ecological Reserach Wksp Taipei, Taiwan http://taibif.tw/en/opendata2013/en/home

Dec. 9-13 American Geological Union San Francisco, CA http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/

Feb. 24-27 International Digital Curation Conference San Francisco, CA http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc14

Mar. 26-28 Research Data Alliance Dublin, Ireland https://rd-alliance.org/rda-third-plenary-meeting.html

upcomingEVENTS

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CybersPotCyberInfrastructure Update

DataONE continues to see steady growth in the amount of content synchronized from Member Nodes and discoverable through the ONEMercury (https://cn.dataone.org) search interface and the programmatic service interfaces (http://mule1.dataone.org/ArchitectureDocs-current/apis/CN_APIs.html). There are currently some 422,000 objects which together provide a total of more than 230,000 publicly accessible data sets.

Activity over the last quarter includes significant effort directed at streamlining

the process for adding Member Nodes to DataONE through several aspects including documentation and planning for two important adjustments to the interactions between Member and Coordinating Nodes. Development work also continued forward with progressive refinement and a few bug fixes to the core infrastructure, and the development of a system status dashboard targeted for general availability early in the next quarter.

Content immutability has been an ongoing topic for discussion within DataONE, and was an important topic considered at the recent CCIT meeting, held at NCEAS in Santa Barbara late in September. On the one hand, immutable content provides end users guarantees that content associated with an identifier will always be available exactly the same. Support for such a requirement is essential for repeating analyses at some point in the future. On the other hand, absolute immutability

imposes significant overhead for Member Node operators and content managers, since any change to content requires that a new identifier be generated, and the system metadata for the old content indicates it is being deprecated by the content recognized the new identifier. Hence any change, such as a correction of punctuation in a metadata document can trigger a cascade of changes that must be properly recorded.

One possible solution was selected out of several that were identified at the CCIT meeting. The solution being evaluated requires no changes to the DataONE APIs, though will require some changes to both Member and Coordinating Nodes. The approach essentially allows Member Node operators to make changes to content

provided such changes are not scientifically significant. Hence, corrections to spelling, punctuation, and other minor upkeep operations may occur with much reduced consequence to Member Node operators. The integrity of content will still be available to users, since the Coordinating Nodes will record when changes to content occurred, and if desired, a user may create a copy, or snapshot of content, and ensure subsequent uses are of the same content by including a reference to the object checksum for precise identification, or time of use for a slightly more ambiguous reference.

The DataONE team has also been developing a renewal proposal that includes some interesting new capabilities that build upon the core infrastructure already in place. Besides ensuring ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure and supporting services,

WorkingGroupFOCUS cont’dThe data exchange protocol (PPSR_CORE)

will define core data fields and formats related to two aspects of PPSR: data about the programs themselves (Program Data Model) and data generated by programs (Observation Data Model). PPSR_CORE will identify required data fields and formats along with optional fields. The standard will be delivered and supported as both a JSON-based and an XML-based protocol to facilitate third party data provider Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to seamlessly share and exchange PPSR data and metadata. We envision that PPSR_CORE will be used by RESTful web services to consume and share data about PPSR programs and data generated by PPSR programs. The proposed PPSR_CORE protocol will form the basis of the newly developed CitizenScience.org web application and database that will facilitate searching of PPSR programs and associated datasets. Finally, the protocol also will facilitate data exchange and sharing with DataONE member nodes, and will lead to the easy development of third party data provider web services to make it easier for PPSR programs to contribute data to DataONE member nodes.

Using the PPSR_CORE Program Data Model, we will be able to launch collection of data for our new PPSR project database, which will be the “one-stop-shop” for understanding the scope and diversity of PPSR projects. This database will drive a PPSR “Dashboard,” housed on CitizenScience.org, which will display in real time and with dynamic visuals a number of relevant statistics related to the field (e.g., number of participants reached through citizen science; disciplines represented; scientific papers published).

After this database is populated we will be able to conduct a very important project, a “Data Usage Study” evaluating the scientific outcomes of PPSR. We had tried to launch this project over the past few months, but realized that we need PPSR projects to self identify their outcomes before we can begin to compile them. This project will likely extend beyond the formal granting period for DataONE, but our working group remains committed to completing it. n

cont’d page 6 ›››

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FeaturedRESOURCE

Practitioner References for Citizen ScienceThe PPSR WG released two practitioner references this year, starting with the Data Management Guide for Public Participation in Scientific Research in February, and its companion, Data Policies for Public Participation in Scientific Research: A Primer, in September. These guides are intended to offer citizen science project organizers key information needed to plan strategies and implement best practices for managing data contributed by volunteers, and to provide background for establishing appropriate policies to safeguard the interests of volunteers, project organizers, and potential data users. Both publications feature examples from citizen science projects that highlight key issues and processes while demonstrating best practices in action.

Prior working group activities identified a strong need for approachable, grounded guidance on data management practices and policies in order to increase the capacity of citizen science projects to make a lasting impact through their scientific contributions. The Data Management Guide provides a step-by-step introduction to the data life cycle situated in the context of citizen science practices. Each step in the data life cycle is accompanied by links to relevant DataONE learning modules and best practices, and translates the key messages into less technical language for the diverse practitioner community. While most data management practices are essentially the same for professional science and citizen science, the guide makes note of specific areas where special consideration may be needed; for example, accommodating volunteer engagement requires extra attention to data policies.

Expanding upon the concerns that were touched upon in the Data Management Guide, the Data Policies Primer presents the main legal and

policy issues that project organizers need to engage. The primary considerations that the primer highlights include intellectual property issues around data ownership, access, and use; privacy protection for participants; plus liability and compliance issues. The primer discusses each piece of this “data policy puzzle” with special attention to the complications encountered by citizen science projects. For example, the section on privacy policies outlines relevant concerns related to website usage data, data security, and volunteer-generated data. The section on volunteer-generated data goes into further detail for two specific pieces of information – volunteers’ email addresses and location-based information – that may be of particular concern for privacy practices. Notably, these considerations are not typically part of standard scientific data management practices, making this guide a unique and important reference for the citizen science organizer practitioner community.

The Data Management Guide was authored by the membership of the entire working group, with contributions from additional authors. The Data Policies Primer was an outcome of a summer internship project, authored primarily by Anne Bowser, in collaboration with her mentors. Both guides are available from the DataONE website and on citizenscience.org, a resource site for citizen science practitioners.

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TheDuGout

Dear DUG Members -We have lots of good news to share in

this newsletter edition! This year’s annual user group meeting went very well and had a great turnout with many new and returning members. Based on feedback from the prior year, we restructured the agenda to provide more opportunity for member interaction and contribution, specifically including a poster session the evening of day one and a series of roundtable discussions on day two. We believe these changes were very well received, and we will likely build further in that direction for our next annual meeting. In addition to these changes, we also continued to include the vitally important opportunities for member node reports, updates from the CI team, discussion and testing of new tools, and sideline user testing activities by various DataONE working group members. We look forward to

these interactions each year and continue to learn about and share experiences and build a stronger DUG community and network.

This annual meeting was also the time for changes in leadership and a few DUG operational revisions. Firstly, the attending members voted us in as Chair and Vice Chair, with the hopes of building upon prior term experience and developing new leadership as well. Secondly, we recognized a need for minor revisions in the DUG Charter and have added a Steering Committee component to welcome participation of additional DUG members to the leadership team. We hope that this approach will help to broaden membership, increase participation beyond the annual meeting, and lay the groundwork for leadership-succession planning in the future.

We are pleased to recognize the following DUG members as volunteers for the Steering Committee. Thank you.

• Deborah Drucker (Brazil - EMBRAPA)

• Dean Walton (USA - University of Oregon)

• Sherry Lake (USA - University of Virginia)

• Myrica McClune (USA - Oregon State University)

• Bob Sandusky (USA - University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

• Dan Phipps (USA - California Digital Library)

• Vida Djaghouri (USA - University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

We will be communicating with you regularly regarding what you would like to see from the DUG and how we can position the DUG to help you better make use of the DataONE tools, infrastructure, and community. Please contact us at dugchairs@dataone.unm.edu with any feedback or ideas for the DUG. n

— Andrew SallansChair, DataONE Users GroupUniversity of Virginia Library

— Chris EakerVice-Chair, DataONE Users Group

University of Tennessee Library

Each Member Node within the DataONE federation completes a description document summarizing the content, technical characteristics and policies of their resources. These documents can be found on the DataONE.org site at bit.ly/D1CMNs. In each newsletter issue we will highlight one of our current Member Nodes.

Taiwan Forestry Research Institute (TFRI) http://metacat.tfri.gov.tw

The forerunner of the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute (TFRI) was established more than 100 years ago in 1896 during the Japanese occupation period. In accordance with changes over time and needs of society, the TFRI has expanded from just a nursery to an organization of 10 forestry technical divisions, 4 administrative units, and 6 research centers with some 300 researchers, technicians and other employees.

By emphasizing the sustainable management and multi-purpose utilization of forests, the TFRI focuses its work on conserving forest resources, restoring rare plants and selectively breeding endemic tree species, introducing superior tree species, improving silvicultural techniques and biotechnologies, establishing environmental protection forests, preventing and controlling forest pests and diseases, monitoring natural forests, setting up tending systems for plantations, integrating watershed management, improving and elevating forest products manufacturing techniques, providing integrated training programs for nature education, enhancing quality of eco-tourism, and demonstrating management of botanical gardens and experimental forests.

The goal of the TFRI is to integrate the research strengths of our scientific research teams to develop forestry techniques with emphasis on forest ecosystem services.

The Taiwan Forestry Research Institute data catalog contains research data from various TFRI divisions and projects that span forests, plants, ecology, and herbariums throughout the country. TFRI’s holdings consist of over 600 data packages consisting of a single metadata document and generally 1-3 data objects, using Ecological Metadata Language as the metadata standard. TFRI personnel shared their Informatics experience with the EAP-ILTER members and helped them to set up Metacat. Besides, TFRI collaborated with KNB on Multi-lingual support of Morpho. All the experience they have can be shared with the broader DataONE community.

MemberNodeDESCRIPTION

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1312 Basehart SEUniversity of New MexicoAlbuquerque, NM 87106

Fax: 505.246.6007

DataONE is a collaboration among many partner organizations, and is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under

a Cooperative Agreement.

Project Director:

William Michenerwmichene@unm.edu

505.814.7601

Executive Director:

Rebecca Koskelarkoskela@unm.edu

505.382.0890

Director of Community Engagement and Outreach:

Amber Buddenaebudden@dataone.unm.edu

505.205.7675

Director of Development and Operations

Dave Vieglaisdave.vieglias@gmail.com

OutreachuPDAtE I want to take a moment to thank all of you

who participated in this year’s DUG meeting. Whether you led one of our roundtable discussions, completed our pre-meeting survey, or engaged as an attendee, DUG 2013 was one of our most interactive meetings yet. Thanks to program suggestions from our community we had some very engaged discussions and a busy opening reception / poster session. If you were unable to attend, speaker presentations and posters are available at http://www.dataone.org/dataone-users-group.

As indicated in 'TheDUGOut' we have now also welcomed a Steering Committee to the DUG to provide additional opportunities for you to become involved. The committee is not yet at capacity and so if you are looking for ways to connect with DataONE, please let us know via dugchairs@dataone.org. Inclusion of a Steering Committee required changes to our charter and following a period of discussion and open comment, we have now created a revised version which can be viewed at http://www.dataone.org/dataone-users-group-charter.

This summer also marked the end of our Summer Internship Program and our annual series of training events at the Ecological Soci-ety of America meeting. As in previous years, DataONE ran a series of workshops and spe-cial sessions at the ESA in addition to hosting and information booth. Again, as in previous years, our sessions were well attended and we received some excellent feedback. And while we always appreciate comments from the au-dience, they were particularly well received fol-lowing our session on Data Management Plan-ning. Why? Because 70 minutes of a 75 minute presentation to a room full of ecologists want-

ing to learn more about data management was done without power. Bill Michener and Carly Strasser gave animated insights and ‘demos’ of tools that support Data Management Plan-ning without slides, without a mic or any other electronic crutch - save the ability to tweet. Feedback was that the session was one of the most engaging people had been to! You can read Carly’s perspective at: http://blog.dmp-tool.org/2013/08/12/report-on-dmptool-at-esa-2013/.

In terms of future activities, DataONE is busy building collaborations and support-ing training at a number of meetings in the next few months. We will be hosting both an

oral and poster session at the AGU on tools, tips and techniques for managing data, with a great line up of presenters. These activities are summarized on page 2 and can be viewed in more detail at bit.ly/D1Events.

Also coming up is an opportunity for Data-ONE to engage in usability testing of the data management planning tool that was high-lighted during our ESA session. As one of the partner organizations of DMPTool, Data-ONE will be facilitating some of the usability testing of the developments that have been occurring this year. We’re excited to have a first glimpse of the new wireframes and are looking forward to the community being able to use the advance features in the new year. n

CyberSPOT cont’d

DataONE Users Group members discuss their work at the first DUG poster session. Photos: Amber Budden

there are plans to continue development of a rigorous provenance tracking capability directly within DataONE (a capability that nicely augments the slight change in content mutability). Other major topics include provision of additional Member Node software solutions and the ability to perform semantic search across data properties.

These new and emerging capabilities will continue to ensure that DataONE remains responsive to community requirements and provide a reliable resource supporting the earth sciences. n