Open@VT

An e-mail about the current university-wide research data survey was recently sent to most faculty members at Virginia Tech (specifically, it was sent to Research Faculty and Collegiate, or Teaching & Research, faculty). The survey addresses many aspects of data management, including data sharing, which is receiving increased attention from research funders as well as journals. Open data is important for research integrity, reproducibility, meta-research, and accelerating discovery. Some have gone so far as to say that a peer-reviewed article is just advertising for the important stuff- the data. Yet there are numerous barriers to sharing (many of them quite valid) that we need to understand.

The survey results will help us identify how data are being stored, managed, shared, and reused by faculty at Virginia Tech. It will also help us gain a better understanding of data management needs and attitudes towards data sharing and discovery.

The survey is sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research and the University Libraries, and administered by the University Libraries. Participation is voluntary and will be recorded confidentially, and no personally identifiable information will be revealed. If you have questions, please contact Yi Shen at yishen18@vt.edu or 540-231-5329.

Helping researchers manage data is a top priority for the University Libraries. Your input is essential to help us serve your needs. If you’ve already completed the survey, thank you. If you haven’t, please take a few minutes to complete it- thanks!

Our panel of faculty and graduate students is one of the most interesting events of every Open Access Week, and the 2014 version did not disappoint. In the past we’ve hosted separate, consecutive panels, but this year we decided to combine the panels into a single, shorter event.

Faculty and Graduate Student Panel,
Open Access Week 2014 at Virginia Tech

Our faculty panelists were Iuliana Lazar (Biological Sciences), Nicolaus Tideman (Economics), and Randy Wynne (Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation). They were joined by our student panelists, Christian Matheis (Ethics & Political Philosophy, and editor-emeritus of SPECTRA), Caitlin Rivers (Computational Epidemiology, Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory), and Michelle Sutherland (Educational Media Company, and former editor of Philologia).

Dr. Tideman had several interesting comments to make about the role of copyright in scholarship, which might be summed up by saying that copyright is inappropriate for academia. Dr. Wynne shared concerns such as reproducibility, data citation, and access to research in the developing world. For Caitlin Rivers, who is working on Ebola epidemiology, the data she uses is open, so it only makes sense that the output is too, and it must be available to people in west Africa. When Michelle Sutherland graduated, she lost access to most peer-reviewed research. This is a point that should be made more often, and it is an irony that this happens after four years of instruction from faculty and librarians on finding and using peer reviewed research. Asked what they do when they encounter paywalls, panelists had a variety of responses, from using the Twitter hashtag #icanhazpdf and sharing personal subscriptions among several people, to searching Google Scholar and research networking sites. For the full discussion, see the panel video below. Thanks very much to our panelists for the insight and discussion!

Thanks to the University Libraries’ Event Capture Service for the video below.

Brian Nosek, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science, gave the keynote address for Open Access Week 2014 on Monday night, October 20. “Scientific Utopia: Improving the Openness and Reproducibility of Research” noted the gap between scholarly values and how scholarship is actually carried out, and described how the Open Science Framework can help address this issue.

Brian Nosek, Open Access Week Keynote Address at Virginia Tech

The presentation began with a slide listing the norms (idealistic values) and counternorms (what often happens) of scholarship as opposing pairs, for example communality vs. secrecy. Looking at the counternorms, it was easy to see that these behaviors are aligned with academic incentives and “getting ahead” in general. Nosek also showed the amusing, if disheartening, results of a study comparing researchers’ agreement with the norms, how well their own practices align with the norms, and how well they think the practices of others align with the norms. He then identified current problems in the published literature of positive results and low power, variability in analysis, and selective reporting.

The Center for Open Science helps enable reproducibility, registration, and openness by making them part of the research workflow. COS endeavors to provide the technology to enable change, the training to enact change, and the incentives to embrace change. The technology is the Open Science Framework, which provides versioning, documentation, and other services in addition to connecting parts of a project together (Dropbox, figshare, etc.). COS offers training in statistics, tools, and workflows both online and in-person. And it’s working on incentives such as usage statistics, badges, and registered reports. Interestingly, registered reports move peer review after the design phase rather than after writing the report, addressing the negative results/selective reporting problem. The current incentive in academia is to get published, not to get it right, but COS is helping to change that.

Brian Nosek’s keynote address was delivered to a packed room- we counted 120 attendees. Thanks to everyone who turned out!

Thanks to the University Libraries’ Event Capture Service for the video below.