News

Have you read a great article or book recently? Curious about what’s been published on research data? From RDAP Education, join us this spring on the fourth Thursday of the month for RDAP Journal Club!

Dates:

• Feb 25, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern/12 p.m. Central/10 a.m. Pacific 
• Mar 25, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern/12 p.m. Central/10 a.m. Pacific 
• Apr 22, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern/12 p.m. Central/10 a.m. Pacific 
• May 27, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern/12 p.m. Central/10 a.m. Pacific 

Bring an article/book you’d like to share – we ask only that you can relate it to data work and that it not be your own research. Give us a short introduction (3 minutes) to the work and tell us what was great (or needs more investigation!).

These events are being hosted by Marian Ekweogwu and Abigail Goben Register to attend the Journal Clubs here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYqce-uqzMrGNQO9VISXVtA7qNuDcYB3qTe

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Questions? Reach out via our Contact Form!

The RDAP Executive Board is appalled by the seditious events that took place on January 6, 2021 at the United States Capitol Building. Our nation’s leaders and our democratic election processes were severely threatened by a coup of predominantly white Trump supporters who continue to believe his falsehoods about election fraud. Even worse, Trump, still America’s president, appeared to have incited this mob's action. 

Some have tried to equate what happened at the Capitol with some of the riots that occurred during or following Black Lives Matter protests. They are not the same thing. Demonstrating for a right to live while black is something we should all be behind as Americans and as human beings. The fact that some leveraged the Black Lives Matter protests as opportunities to spread anarchy is horrible, but the real tragedy is the damage done to those protests’ message of the right to live; that innocent lives have been snuffed out by those who are supposed to protect and serve. You can't replace someone's life; you can rebuild a store. 

This would-be Capitol coup was caused by a weeks-long temper tantrum about an election decidedly lost. Our President encouraged his angry fans to storm the Capitol and do what they would to oppose our constitutional democratic processes. We saw, we will not forget, nor let this pass out of mind without being addressed. We empathize with those of you who are fighting both public and private battles with others who do not or cannot see the writing on the wall. You are not alone in your disappointment, anger and frustration.

On January 20th, we will have a new administration. One that has already shown a desire to unite rather than divide. One that will represent all Americans rather than a small base. And one that will listen to experts so we can begin winning this fight against the coronavirus and work to undue countless wrongs done by the current administration. This is not over, and we will all have to work together to right so many wrongs, on so many levels. We can do this. There is hope.

Jennifer Darragh, President
Jonathan Petters, Vice President
Tobin Magle, Past President
Christopher Eaker, Treasurer
Rachel Woodbrook, Secretary

A five person team working under the auspices of RDAP updated the content of the SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) data sharing resource. This is a community resource that allows for tracking, understanding, and comparison of current U.S. federal funder research data sharing policies. By updating the content, these efforts sustain the resource as a useful tool for data management professionals, especially those supporting US government-funded research.  

The group includes:

• Jonathan Petters, Virginia Tech (Team lead)

• Hannah Calkins, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

• Patricia Condon, University of New Hampshire

• Rachel Woodbrook, University of Michigan

• Reid Boehm, University of Houston

This updating project started in January 2020 and the updated content was released February 2021. The group came together around a shared desire to see this information resource sustained. This process allowed us to learn more about the nuances of the agencies, and about each other. We saw this update as a valuable endeavor for growth on many levels. The project leads to more collaboration opportunities between RDAP and SPARC and the group plans to write a manuscript comparing and contrasting the content in policy facets across the agencies giving a picture of the changes and trends over the last 5 years. To read more, visit the SPARC newsletter https://sparcopen.org/news/. More  information about the process and content for each agency is available on the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/C4PD8.

In order to maintain momentum with the RDAP Association’s desire to be an open, inclusive and accessible organization for all (Strategic Goal 3) as well as an advocate for anti-racism and anti-discrimination, the Executive Board and Leadership Team are asking for a small team of dedicated members to help guide our work in this area. As such we are forming a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism (DEIA) Task Force.

The Charge:

The Research Data Access & Preservation (RDAP) Association is committed to advocating for and actively supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism within our organization and within the fields of data management and curation. As such, the organization is creating a task force that will work closely with the seven RDAP Action Committees and the Executive Board to identify where and how DEIA touches our work and broader society, how to improve, how to measure our successes, and how to address and learn from our failures. The task force will have one year to develop a cohesive plan and identify measurable (SMART) goals for the association. During the planning year, regular progress reports will be provided to the RDAP membership via RDAP Happenings newsletter (and other channels as needed).

Get Involved:

If you are interested in volunteering for this task force, please see the announcement in the upcoming RDAP Happenings Newsletter. Volunteers are asked to provide statement of interest (up to 2500 character/500 words) as to why they would like to be a part of this effort. If interested in leading this task force, please indicate that as part of your submission. A subset of the Executive Board and Leadership Team (Action Committee Chairs) will review these statements and invite six RDAP members to serve on the task force and identify one of the six as the chair. The chair of the group will be invited to attend the monthly RDAP Leadership Team meetings to update RDAP Leadership on progress and to ask for input as desired. 

The Process:

Because we recognize that this is important work, we anticipate that there may be a lot of interest from the RDAP community about getting involved, as such, the call for volunteers will be handled as follows:

1. The RDAP President will provide a form for interested RDAP members to provide up to a 2500 character (~500 words) statement of interest for joining this DEIA Task force effort (linked in upcoming October RDAP Happenings). Your name and email address will be collected on this form so that you may be notified if selected. An additional field on the form will allow volunteers to indicate if they would be willing to chair the group. The volunteer form will be open for two weeks. 
   
   
2. The RDAP President will remove names from the submitted forms and provide the selection team with only the statements of interest and whether the volunteer is interested in chairing the group. As a result, the RDAP President will not be part of the selection team. 
   
   
3. Volunteers will be selected based on the strength of their statement. We realize this review cannot be fully objective due to the importance and sensitivity of the topic. Statements should include more than “personal stakes” - for example, what you would like to change, where you see major pain points, and/or how you are qualified to do this work. Statements are considered confidential.
   
   
4. The selection team will have two weeks to provide recommendations to fill the six member taskforce, including the chair, to the RDAP President.
   
   
5. The RDAP President will contact the volunteers to determine that they are still willing and able to serve on the taskforce , and that a chair from among that group is in place.
   
   
6. The RDAP President will announce the new Task Force to the RDAP Membership.

This year has presented the world, and the United States in particular, with constant reminders of the systemic racism built into our society. This includes the heightened xenophobia and racism that the Asian community has experienced in relation to COVID-19, to police violence against Black and African Americans, and health disparities with COVID-19 that include Latinx and First Nations Communities. While those of us who are not part of these groups will never understand the impact that this situation has on you, these events are causing us to think more about how we support Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) in and through the RDAP Association. As a new professional organization, we have a long way to go in this area. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a pillar of our Strategic Plan for the next 5 years. 

The RDAP Executive Board would like to offer our members resources they can use to educate themselves about and take action against racism in the United States in general. However, we also must consider the impact of systematic racism in our work. A few examples are listed below:

• “Big Data” is frequently used to harm BIPOC in the form of racial profiling.
• Researchers are developing anti-racism methods to use in big data research.
• The justice system, financial institutions and insurance companies are using algorithms to make decisions about people’s lives that reflect the bias that we see in society. Books to read on this topic include Weapons of Math Destruction and Algorithms of Oppression.
• Data invisibility of First Nations students in higher education ignores their experiences when setting educational policies.
• As discussed in the RDAP 2020 keynote, the long history of libraries and archives taking data and information from underrepresented groups as part of larger colonial practices.

RDAP is taking action by donating $250 to Data 4 Black Lives, an organization that does advocacy in these areas. We are also undergoing a website redesign and would welcome community input on diversity and antiracism resources that we can include. Please use our Contact Us form to suggest resources for our new website or any other ideas about this topic you would like to share.

The RDAP Board,

• Tobin Magle (President) 
• Jennifer Darragh (Vice President)
• Joanna Thielen (Secretary)
• Chris Eaker (Treasurer)
• Erica Johns (Past President)

Join us for a virtual Town Hall on Tuesday, June 2, 2020 at 11am PDT/12pm MDT/1pm CDT/2 pm EDT on a draft of proposed amendments to the RDAP Association bylaws.

The current bylaws can be found on RDAP’s OSF site: https://osf.io/3p9ew/ . A Google Doc with the proposed amendments will be shared closer to the Town Hall.

Meeting information was sent to RDAP members via email. Not currently a member? Join today! Already a member but didn’t get the email with meeting details? Contact us!

Questions or concerns? Use the Contact Us form. Looking forward to talking with you all at the Town Hall! 

The Research Data Access and Preservation Association (RDAP) and the Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) are pleased to continue their partnership and announce that there will be a Special Issue published by JeSLIB for the 2020 RDAP Summit.

The 2020 Special Issue will focus on the Summit’s themes, “Connecting Through Data”, considering how different communities are impacted by our systems, technology, values, and practices, who our communities are by and for, and to look at data services through a critical lens.

This is an open submissions call, and we encourage all presenters (talk, poster, presentation), especially first-time presenters, to submit. We are also encouraging new and veteran RDAP Summit attendees to write and submit Commentaries to the special issue – it’s a great way to jump into scholarly publishing! Guidelines for authors can be found at https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/styleguide.html. Please read and follow these instructions carefully when preparing your manuscript. 

Need help getting started? Thea Atwood and Kristine Lee gave a wonderful presentation at RDAP 2019 on “Turning Your Poster or Presentation into an Article.” View their super helpful slides: https://tufts.box.com/s/ndnlczxgkenb7480d4wf5ln8zuq5u9wd   

To submit your paper, go to https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/cgi/submit.cgi?context=jeslib

Your manuscript will be subject to a full, double-blind peer review process and copy editing. Commentaries are not peer reviewed but are read and edited by the guest editors and editor-in-chief.

Along with submitting the paper you should also submit a cover letter clearly explaining the paper’s premise and additional changes or submissions made to presentation content when writing the paper.

The schedule for this special issue is as follows:

• June 5, 2020 – Submission deadline
• June 8 – July 31, 2020 – Peer review and notification of decision
• September 11, 2020 – Revised manuscript deadline
• September 2020 – Copyediting
• October 2020 – Processing and publication

Please note acceptance of all articles/commentaries is not guaranteed, although we hope that all authors whose manuscripts are of high quality will be accepted.

JeSLIB Editorial Team

Regina Raboin, Editor-in-Chief, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Sally Gore, Associate Editor, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Julie Goldman, Managing Editor, Harvard Medical School

Lisa Palmer, Distribution Editor, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Application programming interfaces — “APIs” — are a key way that systems make functionality and detailed information available. Long available only to software developers, modern APIs are quite accessible to the human user, even those with no programming skills! This webinar will cover: 

• why you might want to access APIs 
• how to formulate API requests using a web browser 
• how to do the same using other freely available tools
• how to interpret and work with responses
• how to translate API documentation to API requests
• examples of APIs drawn from repository, preprint, and identifier systems 
• next steps to crawling information from APIs 

The webinar is specifically targeted at those working in libraries and library-like settings, who may want or even need to access APIs, but who have no programming or command line experience. 

Greg Janée is director of the Data Curation Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a certified Carpentry instructor. He’s been a researcher and developer in the areas of digital libraries and digital preservation for over twenty years. As a software developer, most recently he was principal developer of the California Digital Library’s EZID persistent identifier service; earlier, he was principal developer of UCSB’s Alexandria Digital Library, Gazetteer Protocol, and related technologies. 

Please join your RDAP colleagues on April 22, 2020 @ 1:00 pm EST for the RDAP Town Hall “Ask Me Anything” series webinar “Using APIs for Non-Programmers”.

As many of you are aware, the discussion around the RDAP logo has been ongoing for a number of years. A logo is important for a professional organization for a number of reasons:

to provide a visual identity for the RDAP community across platforms and communication methods,

to solidify the RDAP Association brand and leverage that brand to demonstrate investment and sustainability to potential partners

to maintain rights to our brand over time via trademark, and more.

With this in mind, RDAP Leadership prioritized the logo redesign for the 2019-2020 fiscal year as a strategic goal for the sustainability of the organization.

RDAP Leadership worked with Project7 Design to complete the redesign of the logo. With their help, Leadership conveyed RDAP Association’s values, mission, and community to P7, who provided options that showcased different aspects of the RDAP Association. Ultimately, RDAP Leadership selected a logo that reflects that many pieces necessary to make up the whole of our incredible community. This logo provides a timeless and inclusive brand for the RDAP Association community.

Without further introduction, here’s our new logo!

Our website and social media will begin to reflect our new logo and we’ll hope you’ll join us in celebrating this exciting new chapter for RDAP! Be sure to share your excitement using the #RDAP20 hashtag or mention us and we’ll be sure to retweet you!

-Cameron Cook

The next webinar in our RDAP “Ask me Anything” town hall series is entitled “Data Management for GIS projects”, and is jointly sponsored by RDAP and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). UCGIS will host this webinar.

Webinar Description: With federal and other funding agencies wanting to ensure long term access to research output, data management planning for GIS projects has great importance. This webinar shares insight on lessons learned through GIS projects and highlights best practices for different steps in project exploration and creation. Also in this webinar a geology researcher using GIS techniques and collecting geospatial data will explain how she communicated her use of best practices through a data management plan for a successfully funded NSF grant. Attendees will understand the importance of well written data management plans, how to put those plans into action through implementing data management planning and reproducible research best practices, and how library engagement can help with data management planning.

Presenters: Amy Koshoffer, University of Cincinnati; Jennifer Latessa, University of Cincinnati; and Paula Figueiredo, North Carolina State University

Data Management for GIS Projects on Feb 26, 2020 2:00 PM EST

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

About UC–GIS: The University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) is a non-profit organization that creates and supports communities of practice for GIScience research, education, and policy endeavors in higher education and with allied institutions. We are the professional hub for the academic GIS community in the United States, with partnerships extending this capacity abroad. Check to see if your institution is a member – https://www.ucgis.org/members