Last volume 4 issue of IJDC just published

On Monday this week, we published volume 4, issue 3 of IJDC. From one respect, this was a miracle of speed publishing, as 7 of the peer-reviewed articles had just been delivered the previous week as part of the International Digital Curation Conference. But we also included an independent article, plus 1 peer-reviewed paper and 3 articles with a rather longer gestation, originating in papers at iPres 2008! There are good and bad reasons for that too lengthy delay.

I wrote in the editorial that I would reproduce part of it for this blog, to attract comment, so here that part is.

"But first, some comments on changes, now and in the near future, that are needed. One major change is that Richard Waller, our indefatigable Managing Editor, has decided to concentrate his energies on Ariadne. Richard has done a grand job for us over the past few years, in his supportive relationships with authors, his detailed and careful editing, and in commissioning general articles. To quote one author: “I note that the standard of Richard’s reviewing is much better than [a leading publisher's]; they let an article of mine through with very bad mistakes in the references without flagging them for review, and were not so careful about flagging where they had changed my text, not always for the better”. The success of IJDC is in no small way a result of Richard’s sterling efforts over the years. I am very grateful to him, and wish him well for the future: Ariadne authors are very lucky!

"Looking to the future of IJDC, we will have Shirley Keane as Production Editor, working with Bridget Robinson who provides a vital link to the International Digital Curation Conference, and several other members of the DCC community. We are seeking to work more closely with the Editorial Board in the commissioning role and to draw on the significant expertise of this group.

"In parallel, we have been reviewing how IJDC works, and are proposing some changes to enhance our business processes and I shall be writing to the Editorial Board shortly. For example, we expect to include articles in HTML- as well as PDF format, to introduce changes to reduce the publishing lead times, and a possible new section with particular practitioner orientation. As part of reduced publishing lead times, we are considering releasing articles once they have been edited after review, leading to a staggered issue which is “closed” once complete. I’m planning to repeat this part of the editorial in the Digital Curation Blog [here], perhaps with other suggestions, and comments [here] would be very welcome."

Oh, we then did a little unashamed puffery...

"We are, of course, very interested in who is reading IJDC, and the level of impact it is having on the community. In order to find out, Alex Ball from UKOLN/DCC has been trying several different approaches in order to get as full a picture as possible.

One approach we have used is to examine the server log for the IJDC website. The statistics for the period December 2008 to June 2009 show that around 100 people visit the site each day, resulting in about 3,000 papers and articles being downloaded each month. It was pleasing to discover we have a truly global readership; while it is true that a third of our readers are in the US and the UK, our content is being seen in around 140 countries worldwide, from Finland to Australia and from Argentina to Zimbabwe. As one would expect, we principally attract readers from universities and colleges, but we also receive visits from government departments, the armed forces and people browsing at home.

"The Journal is also having a noticeable impact on academic work. We have used Google Scholar to collect instances of journal papers, conference papers and reports citing the IJDC. In 2008, there were 44 citations to the 33 papers and articles published in the Journal in 2006 and 2007, excluding self-citations, giving an average of 1.33 citations per paper. Overall, three papers have citation counts in double figures. One of our papers (“Graduate Curriculum for Biological Information Specialists: A Key to Integration of Scale in Biology” by Palmer, Heidorn, Wright and Cragin, from Volume 2, Issue 2) has even been cited by a paper in Nature, which gives us hope that digital curation matters are coming to the attention of the academic mainstream."

OK, so we're not Nature! Nevertheless, we believe there is a valuable role for IJDC, and we'd like your help in making it better. Suggestions please...

(I made this plea at our conference, and someone approached me immediately to say our RSS feed was broken. It seems to work, at least from the title page. So if it still seems broken, please get in touch and explain how. Thanks)

New issue of IJDC

The latest issue (volume 4, issue 2) of the International Journal of Digital Curation is now available. It's a bumper issue, with two letters to the editor (a whiff of controversy there!), 8 peer-reviewed papers (originating from last year's International Digital Curation Conference), and 6 general articles (two of which came from last year's iPres08 conference). I'm really pleased with this issue, which as always is extremely interesting.

This is the last issue to be produced by Richard Waller as Managing Editor, and I'd like to pay tribute to his dedication in making IJDC what it is today. He has sourced most of the general articles himself, and those who have worked with him as authors will know the courteous detail with which he has edited their work. They may not know the sheer blood, sweat and tears that have been involved, nor the extraordinarily long hours that Richard has put in to make IJDC what it is, alongside his "day job" of editing Ariadne. Thank you so much, Richard.

We will have a new Production Editor for the next issue, whom I will introduce when that comes out (we hope at about the same time as this year's International Digital Curation Conference in London... have you registered yet?). We have some interesting plans to develop IJDC in volume 5, next year.

Update: I thought I should have said a bit more about the contents, so the following is abridged from the Editorial.

Two papers are linked by their association with data on the environment. Baker and Yarmey develop their viewpoint with environmental data as background, but their emphasis is more on arrangements for data stewardship. Jacobs and Worley report on experiences in NCAR in managing its “small” Research Data Archive (only around 250 TB!).

Halbert also looks at elements of sustainability, in distributed approaches that are cooperatively maintained by small cultural memory organizations. Naumann, Keitel and Lang report on work developing and establishing a well-thought out preservation repository dedicated to a state archive. Sefton, Barnes, Ward and Downing address metadata, plus embedded semantics; their viewpoint is that of document author. Gerber and Hunter similarly address metadata and semantics, this time from the viewpoint of compound document objects

Finally, we have two papers loosely linked through standards, though from different points on the spectrum of the general to the particular, as it were. At the particular end, Todd describes XAM, a standard API for storing fixed content; while from the more general end, Higgins provides an overview of continuing efforts to develop standards frameworks.

Moving on to general articles, in this case I would like to mention first my colleagues Pryor and Donnelly, who present a white (or possibly green?) paper on developing curation skills in the community.

Next, I would highlight two very interesting articles that originated from iPres 2008. These are Dappert and Farquahar who look at how explicitly modelling organisational goals can held define the preservation agenda. Woods and Brown describe how they have created a prototype virtual collection of 100 or so of the thousands of CD-ROMs published from many sources, including the US Government Printing Office. Shah presents the second part of his interesting independently-submitted work on preserving ephemeral digital videos. Finally, Knight reports from a Planets workshop on its preservation approach, while Guy, Ball and Day report from a UK web archiving workshop.

IJDC Volume 4(1) was published

That's volume 4, issue 1 of the International Journal of Digital Curation... and I didn't report it here. My apologies for that. It's our biggest issue yet, with 10 peer-reviewed papers and 4 general articles, plus 2 editorials (a guest editorial from Malcolm Atkinson, and a normal one from me). There's some really interesting stuff, mostly from the Digital Curation Conference in Edinburgh last year.

There are still a few papers from last year's conference to come, plus a selection from iPres 2008 at the BL in London as well. We are also hoping that some papers will emerge from iPres 09, which has just opened registration, and will shortly be feeding back the results of their selection process to authors. Still time to submit to this year's Digital Curation Conference, guys (submissions close August 7, 2009).

We have done a couple of interesting analyses on the IJDC. One was a "readership analysis" based on web stats, for the period January-June 2009. Eight out of the ten most down-loaded papers in that time were from IJDC 3(2) (the ninth was from 3(1), and the tenth was from IJDC 1). These 10 papers were down-loaded just under 440 times each during that period (395 to 485 times).

The second was to use Google Scholar to assess citations for the issues up to and including 3(2). Issue 4(1) is too recent. I checked the peer-reviewed papers, which GS suggested had been cited 92 times (maximum 11 times for that most-down-loaded Beagrie article from Issue 1), for an average of 3.3 citations per paper. I also checked the articles, although I ignored simple reports, editorials and reviews. Counting peer-reviewed papers and checked general articles, there were 142 citations, for an average of 2.7 citations per item.

Only one out of those eight most down-loaded papers in issue 3(2) had translated those downloads into significant citations, the Cheung paper has 6. But we should give them time, I think; citations per checked item per issue are noticeably lower for more recent items, as you might expect.

• 4.2 in IJDC 1
• 3.3 in IJDC 2(1)
• 4.2 in IJDC 2(2)
• 2.1 in IJDC 3(1)
• 1.4 in IJDC 3(2)

By the way, we are particularly proud of one citation of an IJDC paper from a paper in Nature's Big Data Issue (Howe et al, The future of biocuration). The citation was of the Palmer et al paper in IJDC 2(2)... but Google Scholar failed to notice it. So these figures come with a few caveats!

5th International Digital Curation Conference: Call for Papers

The Call for Papers for the 5th International Digital Curation Conference has just been published. With the title "Moving to Multi-Scale Science: Managing Complexity and Diversity", the conference will be held in London from 2-4 December, 2009. I believe this is THE conference for papers on advances in digital and data curation! The text of the call follows:

We invite submission of full papers, posters, workshops and demos and welcome contributions and participation from individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains that are engaged in the creation, use and management of digital data, especially those involved in the challenge of curating data for e-science and e-research.

Proposals will be considered for short (up to 6 pages) or long (up to 12 pages) papers and also for demonstrations, workshops and posters. The full text of papers will be peer-reviewed; abstracts for all posters, workshops and demos will be reviewed by the co-chairs. Final copy of accepted contributions will be made available to conference delegates, and papers will be published in our International Journal of Digital Curation [external]. Accordingly, we recommend that you download our template and read the advice on its use.

Papers should be original and innovative, probably analytical in approach, and should present or reference significant evidence (whether experimental, observational or textual) to support their conclusions.

Subject matter could be policy, strategic, operational, experimental, infrastructural, tool-based, and so on, in nature, but the key elements are originality and evidence. Layout and structure should be appropriate for the disciplinary area. Papers should not have been published in their current or a very similar form before, other than as a pre-print in a repository.

We seek papers that respond to the main themes of the conference: multi-scale, multi-discipline, multi-skill and multi-sector, and that relate to the creation, curation, management and re-use of research data. Research data should be interpreted broadly to include the digital subjects of all types of research and scholarship (including Arts and Humanities, and all the Sciences). Papers may cover:

• Curation practice and data management at the extremes of scale (e.g. interactions between small science and big science, or extremes of object size, numbers of objects, rates of deposit and use)
• Challenging content: (e.g. addressing issues of data complexity, diversity and granularity)
• Curation and e-research, including contextual, provenance, authenticity and other metadata for curation (e.g. automated systems for acquiring such metadata)
• Research data infrastructures, including data repositories and services
• Disciplinary and inter-disciplinary curation challenges and data management approaches, standards and norms
• Promoting, enabling, demonstrating and characterizing the re-use of data
• Semantically rich documents (e.g. the “well-supported article”)
• The human infrastructure for curation (e.g. skills, careers, training and organisational support structures, careers, skills, training and curriculum)
• Curation across academia, government, commerce and industry
• Legal and policy issues; Creative Commons, special licences, the public domain and other approaches for re-use, and questions of privacy, consent, and embargo
• Sustainability and economics: understanding business and financial models; balancing costs, benefits and value of digital curation

Important Dates

• Submission of papers for peer-review: 24 July 2009
• Submission of abstracts posters/demos/workshops: 24 July 2009
• Notification of authors of papers: 18 September 2009
• Notification of authors of posters/demos/workshops: 2 October 2009
• Final papers deadline: 13 November 2009
• Final posters deadline: 13 November 2009

New issue of International Journal of Digital Curation

I am very pleased to announce the publication of Volume 3, Issue 1 of the International Journal of Digital Curation, at http://www.ijdc.net/

This is the largest issue so far, including 9 peer-reviewed papers and 8 articles. My thanks to all the contributors, and to Richard Waller for his excellent editorial work.

Papers (Peer-reviewed)

• Evolving a Network of Networks: The Experience of Partnerships in the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Martha Anderson
• Toward Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Preservation: The Roles of Collaboration and Trust. Michael Day
• Dataset Preservation for the Long Term: Results of the DareLux Project. Eugène Dürr, Kees van der Meer, Wim Luxemburg, Ronald Dekker
• Curation of Laboratory Experimental Data as Part of the Overall Data Lifecycle. Jeremy Frey
• Towards a Theory of Digital Preservation. Reagan Moore
• Challenges and Issues Relating to the Use of Representation Information for the Digital Curation of Crystallography and Engineering Data. Manjula Patel, Alexander Ball
• Defining File Format Obsolescence: A Risky Journey. David Pearson, Colin Webb
• Data Documentation Initiative: Toward a Standard for the Social Sciences. Mary Vardigan, Pascal Heus, Wendy Thomas
• Moving Archival Practices Upstream: An Exploration of the Life Cycle of Ecological Sensing Data in Collaborative Field Research. Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman, Matthew S. Mayernik, Alberto Pepe

Articles

• The DCC / Regional eScience Collaborative Workshop. Martin Donnelly
• The DCC Curation Lifecycle Model. Sarah Higgins
• What to Preserve?: Significant Properties of Digital Objects. Helen Hockx-Yu, Gareth Knight
• Recycling Information: Science Through Data Mining. Michael Lesk
• The Fit Between the UK Environmental Information Regulations and the Freedom of Information Act. Colin Pelton, Mark Thorley
• Review: Scholarship in the Digital Age. Chris Rusbridge
• Meeting Curation Challenges in a Neuroimaging Group. Angus Whyte, Dominic Job, Stephen Giles, Stephen Lawrie

IJDC again

At the end of July I reported on the second issue of the International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC), and asked some questions:

"We are aware, by the way, that there is a slight problem with our journal in a presentational sense. Take the article by Graham Pryor, for instance: it contains various representations of survey results presented as bar charts, etc in a PDF file (and we know what some people think about PDF and hamburgers). Unfortunately, the data underlying these charts are not accessible!

"For various reasons, the platform we are using is an early version of the OJS system from the Public Knowledge Project. It's pretty clunky and limiting, and does tend to restrict what we can do. Now that release 2 is out of the way, we will be experimenting with later versions, with an aim to including supplementary data (attached? External?) or embedded data (RDFa? Microformats?) in the future. Our aim is to practice what we may preach, but we aren't there yet."

I didn't get any responses, but over on the eFoundations blog, Andy Powell was taking us to task for only offering PDF:

"Odd though, for a journal that is only ever (as far as I know) intended to be published online, to offer the articles using PDF rather than HTML. Doing so prevents any use of lightweight 'semantic' markup within the articles, such as microformats, and tends to make re-use of the content less easy."

His blog is more widely read than this one, and he attracted 11 comments! The gist of them was that PDF plus HTML (or preferably XML) was the minimum that we should be offering. For example, Chris Leonard [update, not Tom Wilson! See end comments] wrote:

"People like to read printed-out pdfs (over 90% of accesses to the fulltext are of the pdf version) - but machines like to read marked-up text. We also make the xml versions availble for precisely this purpose."

Cornelius Puschmann [update, not Peter Sefton] wrote:

"Yeah, but if you really want semantic markup why not do it right and use XML? The problematic thing with OJS (at least to some extent) is/was that XML article versions are not the basis for the "derived" PDF and HTML, which deal almost purely with visuals. XML is true semantic markup and therefore the best way to store articles in the long term (who knows what formats we'll have 20 years from now?). HTML can clearly never fill that role - it's not its job either. From what I've heard OJS will implement XML (and through it neat things such as OpenOffice editing of articles while they're in the workflow) via Lemon8 in the future."

Bruce D'Arcus [update, not Jeff] says:

"As an academic, I prefer the XHTML + PDF option myself. There are times I just want to quickly view an article in a browser without the hassle of PDF. There are other times I want to print it and read it "on the train."

"With new developments like microformats and RDFa, I'd really like to see a time soon where I can even copy-and-paste content from HTML articles into my manuscripts and have the citation metadata travel with it."

Jeff [update, not Cornelius Puschmann] wrote:

"I was just checking through some OJS-based journals and noticed that several of them are only in PDF. Hmmm, but a few are in HTML and PDF. It has been a couple of years since I've examined OJS but it seems that OJS provides the tools to generate both HTML and PDF, no? Ironically, I was going to do a quick check of the OJS documentation but found that it's mostly only in PDF!

"I suspect if a journal decides not to provide HTML then it has some perceived limitations with HTML. Often, for scholarly journals, that revolves around the lack of pagination. I noticed one OJS-based journal using paragraph numbering but some editors just don't like that and insist on page numbers for citations. Hence, I would be that's why they chose PDF only."

I think in this case we used only PDF because that was all our (old) version of the OJS platform allowed. I certainly wanted HTML as well. As I said before, we're looking into that, and hope to move to a newer version of the platform soon. I'm not sure it has been an issue, but I believe HTML can be tricky for some kinds of articles (Maths used to be a real difficulty, but maybe they've fixed that now).

I think my preference is for XHTML plus PDF, with the authoritative source article in XML. I guess the workflow should be author-source -> XML -> XHTML plus PDF, where author-source is most likely to be MS Word or LaTeX... Perhaps in the NLM DTD (that seems to be the one people are converging towards, and it's the one adopted by a couple of long term archiving platforms)?

But I'm STILL looking for more concrete ideas on how we should co-present data with our articles!

[Update: Peter Sefton pointed out to me in a comment that I had wrongly attributed a quote to him (and by extension, to everyone); the names being below rather than above the comments in Andy's article. My apologies for such a basic error, which also explains why I had such difficulty finding the blog that Peter's actual comment mentions; I was looking in someone else's blog! I have corrected the names above.

In fact Peter's blog entry is very interesting; he mentions the ICE-RS project, which aims to provide a workflow that will generate both PDF and HTML, and also bemoans how inhospitable most repository software is to HTML. He writes:

"It would help for the Open Access community and repository software publishers to help drive the adoption of HTML by making OA repositories first-class web citizens. Why isn't it easy to put HTML into Eprints, DSpace, VITAL and Fez?

"To do our bit, we're planning to integrate ICE with Eprints, DSpace and Fedora later this year building on the outcomes from the SWORD project – when that's done I'll update my papers in the USQ repository, over the Atom Publishing Protocol interface that SWORD is developing."

So thanks again Peter for bringing this basic error to my attention, apologies to you and others I originally mis-quoted, and I look forward to the results of your efforts! End Update]

IJDC Issue 2

I am very happy that Issue 2 of the International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC) is now out. This open access journal issue contains 7 peer-reviewed papers and 7 general articles.

I am listed as editor, and did write the editorial, but Richard Waller of UKOLN did all the hard editorial work, in between his day job on Ariadne. Not to mention our authors, of course! My heartfelt thanks to all concerned.

We have a few articles in the pipeline for Issue 3, but I do want to get up a good head of steam. So if you, dear reader, care about digital curation, the care and feeding of science data, the relationship of data to publication, the rights and wrongs of access to data, and/or digital preservation, and have some research results to put forward, please do write us a paper or an article!

We are aware, by the way, that there is a slight problem with our journal in a presentational sense. Take the article by Graham Pryor, for instance: it contains various representations of survey results presented as bar charts, etc in a PDF file (and we know what some people think about PDF and hamburgers). Unfortunately, the data underlying these charts are not accessible!

For various reasons, the platform we are using is an early version of the OJS system from the Public Knowledge Project. It's pretty clunky and limiting, and does tend to restrict what we can do. Now that release 2 is out of the way, we will be experimenting with later versions, with an aim to including supplementary data (attached? External?) or embedded data (RDFa? Microformats?) in the future. Our aim is to practice what we may preach, but we aren't there yet.

If anyone knows how to do this, do please get in touch!