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The Data Curation Center has just held their 2nd International Digital Curation Conference, in Glasgow. The official DCC blog for the conference tracks the thoughts and discourse over the two days and the full program can be found here. As the conference name suggests, the meeting has the particular focus on different aspects of the digital curation life-cycle including managing repositories, educating data scientists and understanding the role of policy and strategy.

One particular talk I was interested in was “The Roles of Shared Data Collections in Neuroscience”. This was presented by a social scientist, as the results of communications with Neuroscientists. Ironically the shared data collection was called “NeuroAnatomical Cell Repository” a pseudonym to “protect the confidentiality of the participants”, so much for the “shared” component! The general conclusions re-iterated what is already know in the bio-sciences; that more experiments are producing large volumes of heterogeneous data that need to be stored, preserved and presented in a manner that allows the efficient use and re-use of the data. There was particular mention that Neuroscience doesn’t have any data reporting standards, a particular buzz-topic in biological sciences.

As a result of this talk, the issue of how we publish this data was again raised, with the provoking statement from the floor, “we should bypass the traditional journals and publish the data ourselves” (a summation of the statement, not an actual quote). This is an issue I have been hearing more and more at recent conferences and in general discussions, a topic that appears to be gathering momentum. Some discourse has already been presented within this blog on some of these issues.

The open panel session on day two, engaged some interesting discussion and I heard a term which I had never heard before, “Open Data“, put forward by Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge). We have all heard of Open Access publishing, (and should not be publishing any other way), but to date this means open access to the journal publication and not the the data that the publication refers to. In something as simple as a graph in a journal publication, generally the access to the numbers/values, has to be re-calculated via a print-out and a ruler. It would be so much easier (and logical) for re-use, analysis or even review, if the presented image was accompanied by the data (even if this was in an excel spreadsheet).

So in summation, the conference presented numerous issues for consideration by a “data scientist” (this may well be the new name for bioinformaticians). The concept of digital data curation is something that is becoming more prevalent in the life-sciences both at the level of the bench scientist (generating metadata) and the analysis, presentation and preservation of the resulting data. No doubt conferences like the DCC will continue to grow in stature and the issues will be further presented in their newly launched International Journal of Digital Curation.