Enhancing access to research data

Abstract

This paper describes an ongoing collaborative effort across digital library and scientific communities in the UK to improve access to research data. A prototype demonstrator service supporting the discovery and retrieval of detailed results of crystallography experiments has been deployed within an Open Archives digital library service model. Early challenges include the understanding of requirements in this specialized area of chemistry and reaching consensus on the design of a metadata model and schema. Future plans encompass the exploration of commonality and overlap with other schemas and across disciplines, working with publishers to develop mutually beneficial service models, and investigation of the pedagogical benefits. The potential improved access to experimental data to enrich scholarly communication from the perspective of both research and learning provides the driving force to continue exploring these issues.

DART: a new missile in Australia's e‐research strategy

“…It focuses upon improving access to publicly funded research by providing researchers and others with the ability to link those datasets with the published articles, thus ensuring the accuracy of the provenance of the original data on which the articles are based. In its first phase (2003‐2004), the eBank project built a demonstrator to show the potential for linking crystallography datasets to publications (Duke et al , 2006). The archive offers a local browse and search interface tailored to crystallography.…”

An E-Science Environment for Service Crystallographyfrom Submission to Dissemination

“…Although the provision of added value by service providers is not currently well-developed, a number of experimental services are being explored. The eBank U. K. project has developed a pilot aggregator service that harvests metadata from the archive and from the literature and makes links between the two. The service is built on DC protocols and is, therefore, immediately capable of linking at the bibliographic level, but for linking on the chemical data set level, a different approach is required.…”