chemistry data in IRs - Project SPECTRa - Peter Morgan - June 12 - IATUL 2007

Peter Morgan
University of Cambridge/Imperial College London, Cambridge CB3 9DR, UK

Facilitating the disposit of experimental chemistry data in institutional repositories: Project SPECTRa

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/spectra/

* Research data and Open Access
* Institutional context

Research Data and Open Access
* 855 repositories - only 6% contain data
* machine-understandable data is needed for
- eScience
- etc.

* Open Data is not the same as OA
* OA licenses often don't address reuse of data

University of Cambridge
* few OA research papers
* large collection ( >175,000 files) of chemistry data files
* chemistry department (Peter Murray-Rust) keen to explore potential of repository

SPECTRa project
* 3 project staff plus librarians & chemists
* end March 2007

aims
* investigate needs in capturing and re-using (chemistry research) data, as well as actually capturing

Survey results
* much data not stored electronically
* many file formats (mainly proprietary)
* ignorance of IRs
* need to restrict access to data

* publication of chemical structures must be embargoed

separate repositories - departmental level ->
institutional repository to includ co-ordinated network of repositories

Conclusions
- there is an optimum moment for data capture
- researchers may not be willing to change their workflows
- data embargo necessary
- need both automated deposit and subsequent human editing
- used DPSpace handles rather than DOIs, but there were handle management issues

* need for researcher education and legal guidance on data sharing and reuse