Welcome

Why focus on open data? A growing area of interest in both the research and library science communities.

Both Ana and John participated in the CLIR postdoctoral fellowship program, which focuses on working in the libraries on open data. “That was a conversation that was kind of happening when I was in graduate school” says John, “but it wasn’t as big of a thing”.

“It works really well to have that research background so that you can relate to people doing the research and then figure out how from the librarian institutional standpoint to better support that” says Ana.

John and Ana collaborated on a survey study to identify the data management and open science practices and their impact in the field of neuroimaging.

John was pretty happy with how the respondents indicated that they were thinking about these issues, and thought the field was better than he would have expected.

There are things that librarians or scholarly communication specialists think a lot about that researchers might not be aware of like licensing and copyrighting.

GitHub is not an archival repository. It is definitely a tool to learn and use, but it is not a place to archive things.

If researchers want to share data at the end of a project, they really need to consider that at the very beginning and write that into all of their documentation and consider what that means about the questions and data they can collect and what they can actually do with it.