where have we been & where are we going?

Where Have We Been & Where Are We Going?

Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.

Associate Director for Data Science

philip.bourne@nih.gov

Its 4 years since many of us stood before the bear.. What has been

accomplished?

http://saltypeppergames.com/why-your-feedback-matters/

https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/

I decided to crowd source an albeit biased answer to that

question

Major Contributors (In Order): Policy

• Funder mandates

• Journals requiring data accessibility

• Joint declaration of data sharing principles

• Gates foundation

• Peer review– Open– Post publication – Independent e.g., axios

Major Contributors (In Order): Software

• GitHub• R• Dropbox• Google Docs• Impact Story• eNotebooks• MathJax

Major Contributors (In Order): Methodology

• Crowdfunding

• Prepublication servers

• Open worm – crowd funding – 60 developers

• Software carpentry

Major Contributors (In Order): Standards

• Orcid

Major Contributors (In Order): Resources

• Figshare

• Wikidata

• Dryad

• Twitter

• Blogs

Major Contributors (In Order): Other

• Altmetrics

• Social reference management

• Growing awareness of research expertise eg Vivo

• Data science as a profession

• Resource Identification Initiative

• Ioannidis work

• Mega journals

Perhaps More of an Unbiased View?

My Personal View

• Pluses– The strength and

breadth of the FORCE community

– The emergence of other related communities

– Funder mandates

– The worldwide focus on data {sharing}

• Minuses– That not more has

been done with the OA corpus

– OA impact has been minimal

– Top down and bottom up have yet to be truly synergistic

– The global community is not united (HIROs)

The Way Forward is 3-Fold

Community Policy

Infrastructure

• Sustainability• Collaboration• Training

A point of note:Both EBI in the EU and NLM in the

US will soon assume new leadership

This is a major opportunity

Community Policy

Infrastructure

The library has a tradition of supporting community, being an infrastructure to

maintain knowledge and in the case of NLM a place to set policy

What should the library / data center of the future look like and can that view inform our future

objectives?

The library (or whatever it is called) should curate, catalog, preserve, and disseminate the

complete digital research lifecycle

You can also imagine this model extending to physical artifacts

“Publishing” should involve review (or not) and subsequent

change in the access control of all or parts of that research lifecycle

Individual Research Objects within a lifecycle should be referenced and described

Temporal order should be maintained

Languages will describe, compare, relate and analyze such

lifecycles

Collections (Formally Databases) Particular collections of curated

research objects that can be reviewed within the research

lifecycle and as part of a collective analysis

Collections are persistent or dynamic

This is a different model than we have today but there are signs and also

resistance

• Signs– Institutional

repositories run by libraries

– Academic presses (?)– Preservation of

workflows

– Portals

• Resistance– Publishers punting on

data and software– Reward structure

ingrained– Few funding

opportunities

It Will Be Interesting to See What Evolves

Thank You!