The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries have been awarded $20 million from the US’ National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant is to fund the building of a data research infrastructure for the management of the ever-increasing amounts of digital information created for teaching and research. The five-year award was one of two for what is being called ‘data curation’.
The project, known as the Data Conservancy, involves individuals from several institutions, with Johns Hopkins University serving as the lead. Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center and associate dean of university libraries, has been named the principal investigator. In addition, seven Johns Hopkins faculty members are associated with Data Conservancy, including School of Arts and Sciences professors Alexander Szalay, Bruce Marsh, and Katalin Szlavecz; School of Engineering professors Randal Burns, Charles Meneveau, and Andreas Terzis; and School of Medicine professor Jef Boeke. The Hopkins-led project is part of a larger $100 million NSF effort to ensure preservation and curation of engineering and science data.
Beginning with life, earth and social sciences, project members will develop a framework to more fully understand data practices currently in use and arrive at a model for curation that allows ease of access both within and across disciplines.
In addition to this $20 million grant, the Libraries received a $300,000 grant from NSF to study the feasibility of developing, operating and sustaining an open access repository of articles from NSF-sponsored research. Libraries staff will work with colleagues from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the University of Michigan Libraries to explore the potential for the development of a repository (or set of repositories) similar to PubMedCentral, the open-access repository that features articles from NIH-sponsored research. This grant for the feasibility study will allow researchers to evaluate how to integrate activities under the framework of Data Conservancy and will result in a set of recommendations for NSF regarding an open access repository.
The rapid rise in the volumes of digital-only information has resulted in more such projects attracting the attention of funding agencies. Last month, the US’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the availability of funding information for grants and contracts through RePORT Expenditures and Results (RePORTER), a new search system on its Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT). RePORTER is expected to allow users to locate descriptions and funding details on NIH-funded projects along with research results that cite NIH support. It seeks to combine NIH project databases and funding records, PubMed abstracts, full-text articles from PubMed Central and information from the US Patent and Trademark Office with a robust search engine.
In August 2009, the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council announced a £10 million funding for the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The funds were to be used for a significant increase in the Institute's data storage and handling capacity.
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