[Themaintainers] Themaintainers Digest, Vol 28, Issue 7

Thu Jun 21 08:16:08 EDT 2018

Thank you Jean-Christophe for highlighting the data “Cleaners”. As a former data cleaner, it’s nice to see proper academic recognition.

FWIW, we often called ourselves data “wranglers”. I That term has ben somewhat co-opted, but the key point is that data managers need to be embedded in the science and scientist need to be embedded in the data management.

See:

Parsons, M. A., M. J. Brodzik, and N. J. Rutter. 2004. “Data Management for the Cold Land Processes Experiment: Improving Hydrological Science.” Hydrological Processes 18(18) (18): 3637–53. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hyp.5801.
(Also paywalled, but available on request)

cheers,

-m.

Mark A. Parsons
0000-0002-7723-0950
Senior Research Scientist
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
http://tw.rpi.edu
 +1 303 941 9986
Skype: mark.a.parsons
mail: 1550 Linden Ave., Boulder CO 80304, USA

On 21 Jun 2018, at 05:00, themaintainers-request at lists.stevens.edu<mailto:themaintainers-request at lists.stevens.edu> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

  1. Re: Recently published article on data cleaners / digression
     on repostiories (Ruth Kitchin Tillman)

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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 10:01:04 -0400
From: Ruth Kitchin Tillman <ruthtillman at gmail.com>
To: themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
Subject: Re: [Themaintainers] Recently published article on data
cleaners / digression on repostiories
Message-ID:
<CADLX-Af=Q9dJjvDFp_3tPnk302tw53eruFUTfuy8t8PK_y-uMg at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Thanks so much for sharing that, Jean-Christophe! I look forward to reading
it. And to cj for the alternative (though luckily I have institutional
access).

Speaking of preprints, I wanted to note that the London School of Economics
and Political Science has a preprint (and, depending on publisher rules,
post-print) site where the article could be posted online:
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ You may already have this in the works,
Jean-Christophe. If not this page has the email where you can send your
work and further details http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/faq.html

I thought I'd email the whole group because I know folks aren't often aware
that they have these opportunities available to them and because one of my
earliest jobs was as a maintainer tasked with keeping the repository
running and finding things to put in it. If you have such a repository, I
encourage you to consider putting things in it when possible, as it's a
service to those who don't feel comfortable using SciHub and who don't use
ResearchGate, etc. Some of you have disciplinary repositories, like arXive
and SSRN, which are great alternatives (well, ok now that SSRN is
Elsevier-owned).

A little on the history of these projects, and of their maintainers. Based
on visions from around 2003, that it would be helpful for those in
disciplines without the arXiv to also have places to put their publications
online -- a number of libraries started building these institutional
repositories. When polled, a lot of faculty agreed because... I think we
can all agree it's helpful to have freely-available copies of things
online, whether the author's accepted manuscript or an actual copy from the
journal.

The disconnect here was that university and library administrators and
others who saw this expected that one could then rely on people to develop
a habit of submitting their work to such repositories. So there was a
flurry of building them, primarily from around 2005-2011, expecting that
"if you build it, they will come." Certainly there was outreach, there were
people tasked with metadata cleanup, there was a lot of work done selling
benefits to the institution. Imagine if you could visit a single page on
such a repository and see every publication put out by your Anthropology
department in the last 5 years!

But that didn't happen.

The literature of "we're doing this!" transformed into the literature of
"ok what's wrong?" Issues varied from poor software design and usability
issues, administrator fears over accidentally violating copyright and thus
complicating submission processes, researcher concerns about the quality of
other things submitted to the repository and/or disciplinary disconnects
with pre-print submission, and the sheer additional burden of figuring out
what's necessary to deposit. Those with most robust pre-print cultures
already had places like the arXiv and SSRN (now under publisher control)
and had no need to put things in a second place.

Library workers were told to find ways to make submission easier. Hence the
LSE repository linked above has an email address where you can send the
info and the person or people receiving it are probably versed in all the
rules around which copy you can use depending on publisher and may fill in
the metadata and do all the work of actually putting it online. Other
places mostly gave up on soliciting material and just kept the
infrastructure up-to-date to prevent hacks.

Other places charged library workers with the mind-numbing task of finding
out what people at their institution are publishing and just putting the
work in the repository (this can generally be done without contact the
author or with contacting them with an FYI if the policies are in place).
These positions are often filled by librarians fresh from graduate school
who have the job of looking for announcements of new publications,
searching journal indexers, even looking through CVs. This was my first
post-graduate position.

Salo's "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel" is perhaps the best take on this
whole story https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088 with her far more
biting take of shiny initiatives and mismanagement in the Journal of
Librarianship and Scholarly Communication:
https://jlsc-pub.org/articles/abstract/10.7710/2162-3309.1075/ If you read
Salo's work, you can catch the undercurrent of the emotional harm done to
these workers and how it affects them. I admire her for leaving that
vulnerability in her writing.

My own piece in the JLSC attempted to get a more quantitative look at it,
which I wrote primarily so that the people in the situations Salo describes
would have the data to understand that it's really not just them. When
you're in a position like this, you really need to know that it's not just
something wrong with you or your institution. The few places where this has
gone "successfully," put in infrastructures which tie it to promotion and
tenure and have some form of OA mandate, but a great deal of labor
(generally made invisible) goes into ensuring the information submitted by
faculty gets transformed into something which can go in repositories
https://jlsc-pub.org/articles/abstract/10.7710/2162-3309.2203/

I admit I'm sharing the story partly because I hope that making it a
narrative vs. just encouraging deposit will mean that it stays in your
imagination when you think about sharing your work and where you can put
it. Not all of you will have such repositories, of course, but many people
I talk to about them are surprised to learn they have one. And while I'm
not in that business any more, new librarians on the job market will take
more of these positions over the summer and find themselves in this strange
world where they're tasked with filling in for the gap between aspiration
and practice. I want more people to know that story.

And I want you to know that if you volunteer your work to one of these,
you'll (probably) cause some maintainer somewhere to have a really good
day. You'll give them a day where they know their work is actually
sometimes visible. That someone knows that they're making things available
online.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
Ruth
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