Because good research needs good data

Call for papers

Beyond FAIR - from principles to practice to global join up
 
Overview
The need to manage and share digital outputs and data has been clearly articulated and gained international traction over the past decade or more. Effective data handling skills and curation services are essential to support and embed these practices. Much progress has been made towards implementation with services being provided by research institutions, funders, domain groups, commercial providers and others. As the landscape matures, attention is turning to coordination and interoperability, with investments being made in the NIH Commons initiative, the European Open Science Cloud and African Open Science Platform. This evolution poses many difficult questions: Who is responsible for what? What do principles like FAIR mean in reality and how should they be assessed? How do you join up or ensure interoperability across existing and emerging infrastructure and services? Where does the investment come from and how do we make this sustainable?
 
The focus of IDCC in 2018 is sharing practical lessons on the efforts made so far to curate data and pursue a digital data commons. Papers should address one of three overarching themes:
 
  • Data
  • Skills and services
  • Value
We want to hear from different communities on data processing pipelines - what works and where do tools fail you? How realistic is it to use other people’s data? And what challenges emerge from the current policies and drivers for openness?
 
Lessons from those supporting and curating data and digital collections are also called for: what programmes have you been running to share skills and build capacity? To what extent are you tailoring provision to different domains? How are the services on offer maturing and evolving?
 
In terms of impact and sustainability, we want to know what value is being generated for society by sharing and reusing data? What models are emerging to demonstrate the impact of services. And how are services being sustained?
 
THE DATA
 
The realities of working with data
  • Fitting a square peg into a round hole - data wrangling experiences from the coalface
  • Using other people’s data and the benefits and challenges this brings
  • Implementing FAIR data - how it applies (or not) in different contexts
  • Data publishing and getting credit
  • The importance of metadata
  • I can’t preserve that! Digital curation lessons learned the hard way
  • Big Data: hype or hope?
Sensitive data and legal challenges
  • Ethical and societal challenges in a climate of openness
  • Fairness, transparency, privacy: can personal data be FAIR?
  • Secure data services
  • Regulatory change and its impact on digital curation
  • Legal interoperability in international research
  • Inspiring trust: needs of the 21st century data governance system
  • Increasing personalization/user modeling and navigating the tension between usability and privacy
THE SKILLS & SERVICES
 
Skills and competence building
  • Data champion and advocacy programmes
  • Emerging models to build capacity and skills e.g. library/researcher partnerships, train-the-trainer models, peer-exchange, summer school programmes, learning-by-doing
  • Professionalising data science and stewardship roles: accreditation and recognition
  • Disciplinary tailoring and research community connections
  • What are the challenges and opportunities in developing cross-domain expertise?
  • Recognising and rewarding good practice
Services
  • Service discoverability in a distributed environment
  • Domain-specific vs generic services - what is the scope for either, what lessons can we draw from existing experience?
  • Many niche providers vs few, monolithic providers - what works best for researchers and research?
  • The role of national data services
  • Building links between people, data and services
  • New innovations and offerings in response to community uptake and needs
  • Interoperability and services as part of the global data commons
THE VALUE
 
Data, society and impact
  • Measuring and demonstrating impact
  • Data science: connecting data to solve grand challenges
  • How to generate significant economic, social and scientific value from (big) data?
  • How machine learning can transform research and change data curation practices
  • Cultural heritage collections, time-based media arts and digital humanities
  • How data can amplify or reduce existing inequalities - or create new ones
Sustainability and coordinated service planning
  • Successful project delivery, now what? How to keep momentum and transition to service
  • Making the business case for open science and research data management
  • Who should pay? Business models for sustainable investments
  • International collaboration and interoperable services
  • Tracking impact and meeting user needs 

Submissions can take a number of forms, including research papers, practice papers, posters and workshops. Papers are all considered for fee-free open-access publication in the International Journal of Digital Curation

For information about the submission process check Submissions

For information about the submission dates for IDCC 2018 check Dates