Working Groups/Science/Oxford/15Mar2012

How to get credit for all of your research - An introduction to figshare by Mark Hahnel
Mark talked us through his frustrations with data publishing and the massive numbers of figures, datasets, media files and more that don't make it into the published literature but may still be of use to other researchers. Figshare allows uploading of most types of data in just a few minutes and the project is at a stage where your suggestions for improvements could really shape the service so check it out and let them know your thoughts!

Opening up reference and citation data by David Shotton
As part of the JISC funded Open Citations project David and his team collected citations from papers in the PubMedCentral open subset for use in generating citation networks. Citation data is in general not available openly but David has been excited in recent days by a major academic publisher (who shall remain nameless until their public announcement) offering to open up this data on his suggestion. As many commercial publishers already supply their citations to CrossRef for linking purposes this should be an easy switch and as David suggested, once one publisher agrees, why not five and why not all of them? A useful expansion to such data sets would be categorising citations as to why the author of a paper is citing those publications e.g. to support them or refute them.

The Oxford e-Research Centre and various exciting projects by David De Roure
David introduced us to a variety of exciting projects happening around the University, which as Professor of e-Research at the OeRC he is well placed to be involved with. He runs myexperiment.org, a repository for scientific workflows (in silico protocols) which makes discovery and reuse easier as well as building communities. The site now hosts now only workflows but packages of research objects including papers, datasets and other research outputs that are associated with them. He is interested in what we define as a research object and how to share the total output of research. An additional interest is computational musicology and he introduced What's the score at the Bodleian? a new collaboration between the Bodleian and Zooniverse to crowdsource transcription of reams of scanned music from the Bodleian archives. This offers new challenges compared to other citizen led projects due to the need for skilled volunteers who can read and digitally transcribe music.

Progress on a global platform for scientific knowledge by Simon Benjamin
Simon Benjamin and Victoria Watson are leading a project to develop a web portal for accessing the many exciting open science projects which add value, interest or function to papers, still the standard unit of academic information gathering. This will ease accessibility to such projects for the average researcher and hopefully demonstrate the usefulness of open science with minimal extra effort or knowledge of the most recent devlopments in open science or scholarly publishing. The format will essentially be a customisable series of windows onto such services and Simon hopes to have a prototype to demonstrate in the near future.

MIIDI and Open Research Reports by Tanya Gray
Tanya has developed a metadata input form generated from an underlying XML data model which allows inputs to be validated against the data model and easily output in various formats such as XML, JSON and more. The original concept was based around extracting minimal information from infectious disease publications to publish as an open summary of closed and subscription only research articles - an Open Research Report. The data model underlying this is based on the Minimal Information standard for reporting an Infectious Disease Investigation (MIIDI) but it has already been altered to capture information from cancer publications and the system itself is generalisable to any XML data model. Tanya would be very keen to hear any ideas for additional uses so check out and get in touch with her.

Discussion Points
There were some great discussions so I've highlighted some of the main points below with links where appropriate.

Open Science in Oxford
The future of the group and what we would like to do. The primary outcomes were:
 * 1) Arrange a monthly meetup which will be realtively general to begin with.
 * 2) Arrange hackdays or workshops to collaborate on projects and start new initiatives
 * 3) Look at training related to open science in the University, particularly at grad level. Some is already being developed, particularly in research data management.
 * 4) Organise further open science flagship events to follow #evolutionofscience - panel debates, lectures etc.

Hargreaves Report and Copyright Law in the UK
It came up that the UK Intellectual Property Office are running a public consultation on copyright law, which follows on from the Hargreaves Report and the government response in 2011.

Replies are due by Wednesday 21 March, they don't have to be long and individuals are very welcome to respond. The OKFN are drafting an open response if you would like to comment or contribute to that.

Open Rights Grouo have created a handy guide to the issues form an education/research perspective and a full list of the consultation questions. The key suggested amendments include:


 * Allow non-commercial researchers to text and data mine material they have lawful access to (e.g. the web / subscribed to journal databases etc). (on page 79-82 of the consultation, and addressed in question 77)
 * Allow digital archiving. (p.70-72 / Q.72)
 * Extend research copying (“fair dealing”) to sound and film, and allow librarians to make copies on behalf of researchers. (p.74 – 77 / Q.75)
 * Widen the existing copyright exception for quotation to allow information, analysis, argument or comment. (p.105 / Q.94.)
 * Facilitate mass digitisation of post 1870 in-copyright materials, including works whose copyright owner cannot be found (“orphan works”.) (p.14 – 39 / Q.1 – 43)
 * Update the existing copyright exceptions for educational establishments and teaching.(p.89-95 / Q.85-89)
 * Make sure that none of these amendments, or existing exceptions in copyright law are “over-ridden” and negated by contracts entered into by individuals or university libraries.(p.116-119 / Q.103)