This special issue tackles critical approaches to archives and archival studies. Since the landmark 2002 Archival Science special issue on "archives, records, and power" edited by Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, there has been an explosion of efforts to examine the ways in which records and archives serve as tools for both oppression and liberation. This recent scholarship and some community-based archival initiatives critically interrogate the role of archives, records and archival actions and practices in bringing about or impeding social justice, in understanding and coming to terms with past wrongs or permitting continued silences, or in empowering historically or contemporarily marginalized and displaced communities. These efforts employ a range of methods (from grounded theory to action research to discourse analysis) and are informed by several approaches to critical theory, ranging from decolonization to postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, and deconstructionism. Notable topics in this arena explore the recordkeeping of oppressive regimes, examine evidence of genocide, racism and human rights violations, or trace the dynamics of postcolonialism and uneven distribution of power.2 By engaging these often painful, complex, and contentious 1
This paper argues that personal actualisation of human and personal rights articulated in key conventions, declarations and other internationally recognized instruments is significantly impeded without similar recognition of individual rights 'in and to records'. It reports on a study in which archival literary warrant analysis was applied top-down on 19 such instruments, and on professional international guidelines for records relevant to human rights. Warrant was also derived bottom-up from media and personal accounts of documentation and recordkeeping challenges faced by refugees. The results of the analyses were used to identify potential rights in and to records necessary to enable and actualise refugees' human rights. These potential rights were then clustered within a framework together with the warrants from which they were derived. While this study makes the case for how a platform of rights in records could support refugees in enabling and actualizing their human rights, further research is necessary to test whether it is sufficiently inclusive to encompass any context in which documentation and recordkeeping play key roles in enabling and actualising human rights, and whether rights in and to records should themselves be recognized as fundamental human rights.
The 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memo on federally-funded research directed agencies with research and development budgets above $100 million to develop and release plans to increase and broaden access to research results, both published literature and data. The agency responses have generated discussion and interest but are yet to be analyzed and compared. In this paper, we examine how 19 federal agencies responded to the memo, written by John Holdren, on issues of scientific data and the extent of their compliance to the directives outlined in the memo. We present a varied picture of the readiness of federal science agencies to comply with the memo through a comparative analysis and close reading of the contents of these responses. While some agencies, particularly those with a long history of supporting and conducting science, scored well, other responses indicate that some agencies have only taken a few steps towards implementing policies that comply with the memo. These results are of interest to the data curation community as they reveal how different agencies across the federal government approach their responsibilities for research data management, and how new policies and requirements might continue to affect scientists and research communities.Keywords: open data; office of science and techology policy; data access; metadata IntroductionOn February 22, 2013, John Holdren, Director of the Obama Administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy, issued a memo to the heads of other government agencies entitled "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research" (Holdren, 2013). This document outlines a vision for both academic papers and scientific data requiring federal agencies with annual research and development budgets above $100 million to draft a plan explaining how they will increase access to the research products produced with federal support. The memo identified eight elements to be included in agency responses. These elements reflect the values and perspective of the Obama administration on federal science, and suggest how the affected agencies, ranging from the Department of Defense to the US Geological Survey, might respond to the Holdren memo. The effects of new agency policies will be felt by intramural (government employed) and extramural (grant-funded) researchers into the future, therefore making these plans and responses important harbingers of what is to come when plans are fully implemented.The memo has generated much discussion in academia and the popular press. Many of these are speculative or editorial in nature (e.g. Berman & Cerf, 2013;Corneliussen, 2016; Franceschi-Bicchierai, 2013; Murphy, 2016; Van Noorden, 2013), but some cite the Holdren memo as inspiration or evidence of the importance of research data. In particular, the memo stimulated the examination of data sharing practices and open access policies (Bishoff and Johnston, 2015; Van Tuyl and Whitmire, 2016). Current published literature, however, has not presented an...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.