Integration of Data and Publications - Alliance for Permanent Access

Report on Integration of Data and Publications Grant Agreement no.: 261530
Astronomy or the said World Data Centres for geophysical data), but with few exceptions
barely visible centres in the Humanities.
One noteworthy example of a publicly funded, national disciplinary data archive, with a
vast collection of digital data in the Social Sciences and Humanities is the UK Data
Archive (UKDA). It was established in 1967 by the UK Social Science Research Council,
which has so far provided the long-term commitment of funds.
The Life Science community is characterized by numerous specialized data centres, e.g.,
GenBank at the US National Center for Biotechnical Information, the Worldwide
Protein data Bank, Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and many more.
4.2. Common practice and rationale for action
Libraries and data centres serve the needs of the research community and in that role,
must react to increasingly demanding user needs (see chapter 2 on researchers’
perspective) and support increasingly sophisticated and complex publishers’ products
(see chapter 3 on publishers’ perspective). In a society where information is available
abundantly and often for free on the internet, libraries and data centres are under
pressure to strengthen their role as professional information suppliers.
Another influencing factor is institutional requirements: Libraries and data centres are
increasingly confronted with data management requirements from their funding bodies,
involving them in data creation during the research workflow. Many academic institutes
in a growing number of countries 56 have adopted Open Access policies which require
their data centres to provide publishing support to the university’s research groups.
More and more funders oblige their grant recipients to make their data (openly)
available after the end of a project (see also “Who pays for what” in chapter 2). There is a
natural expectation that libraries and data centres will support the principal
investigators with data management plans and to provide secure storage space for the
created data.
A large evidence base on the common practice as well as on trends in the scientific
infrastructure is available from the PARSE.Insight project. As far as libraries and data
centres are concerned, however, the underlying figures must be interpreted carefully.
The PARSE.Insight report never consistently defined the difference between data
centres and libraries as we try to do for this report. The stakeholder group “data
management” of the PARSE.Insight survey was composed of 7 archives, 20 data centres,
152 research libraries, 13 regional institutes, 24 national libraries and 3 institutions
that identified themselves as “other” (see Graph 24).
56 See ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies:
http://roarmap.eprints.org/
Opportunities for Data Exchange (ODE) –www.ode-project.eu 64