The Data Conservancy, IEEE, and Portico have announced their partnership to design and prototype a data curation infrastructure that connects published research and associated data sets for the long-term benefit of researchers worldwide. This two-year project, which is supported by a $602,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will result in the development of a service that will build, store, update, and retrieve the connections among publications and data, and preserve those connections over the long-term.
Scholarly digital publications increasingly consist of distinct building blocks, including text, graphics, and data, which often reside in different repositories and are maintained by different institutions, employing different technologies. These components have many, and evolving, relationships that must be preserved over time. This project will make it possible to preserve not just these publications and their underlying data, but the complex relationships among them, thereby supporting the continual development of scholarly communication and digital publishing.
The Data Conservancy, a data curation organization; IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organisation and publisher of nearly a third of the world’s technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics; and Portico, a digital preservation service, bring together years of experience in digital scholarship, publishing, and preservation. The research work will build on the existing infrastructure, expertise, and relationships they have developed over time.
In the initial phase, project leaders will gather requirements from members of the publishing and scholarly communities engaged in research across the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
