If you have worked on a data management plan for an NSF grant, or shoot, just worked on sharing data, you may have been confronted with a drought or deluge of policies, metadata standards and and other considerations as you describe how you will share your data.
In this post and a few to follow, I’ll highlight some resources that are worth a visit as you develop and implement a data sharing plan.
Of course, I’m hoping that the UO data management pages are useful, but there are other resources that are on the rise and not yet incorporated into the UO site (but soon to be!).
BioSharing
BioSharing‘s goal is to create
stable linkages between journals, funders, implementing data sharing policies, and well-constituted standardization efforts in the biosciences domain, to expedite the communication and the production of an integrated standards-based framework for the capture and sharing of high-throughput genomics and functional genomic bioscience data, in particular. This objective is achieved via the creation of web-based catalogues and a communication forum…
The products are a catalog of the following:
– reporting requirements (minimal information checklists to report of the same core set of information)
– terminological artifacts (such as controlled vocabularies and ontologies to describe the information)
– exchange formats (to communicate the information)
The need for standards
More about the need for standards to enable discovery and data sharing is outlined in My Data are Your Data, in Nature Biotechnology:
In January, over 50 researchers from 30 academic and commercial organizations agreed on a standard for describing data sets. The BioSharing initiative, comprising both researchers and publishers, launched the Investigation-Study-Assay ISA Commons, which promises to streamline data sharing among different databases. Life scientists have thousands of databases, over 300 terminologies and more than 120 exchange formats at their disposal, says BioSharing co-founder Susanna-Assunta Sansone of the University of Oxford. In this era of collaborative big science, researchers only move forward by “walking together.”
