Day: October 31, 2012

Open Access by Peter Suber

Posted on by Claude Potts

Open Access by Peter Suber (MIT Press, 2012)

In the wake of last week’s international Open Acccess Week and especially the Library-sponsored faculty conversation with UCSF Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery Rich Schneider, I’d like to call everyone’s attention to the new ebook by Peter Suber titled Open Access (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012) which answers most of the questions regarding OA. Called the “indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers,” it will become OA in June 2013, one year from the date of publication but is now available to the UC Berkeley community through ebrary.

Other recent library aquisitions are continously updated through OskiCat and also through the library subject pages for French, Italian, and Iberian Studies (Spanish & Portuguese).

Enjoy!

DataUp: describe, manage and share your data

Posted on by Brian Quigley

Recently the California Digital Library (CDL) and its partners released DataUp, a free tool to help researchers (especially in the earth, ecological, and environmental sciences) to manage and archive their tabular data. It was developed to integrate with Microsoft Excel, though researchers can use the Web application and/or Microsoft Excel add-in. Both versions allow users to:

  • Perform a “best practices check” to ensure data are well-formatted and organized
  • Create standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template
  • Retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from the data repository
  • Post their datasets and associated metadata to the ONEShare repository.

More information about DataUp can be found in the press release and the DataPub blog. DataUp joins other data management tools developed by CDL and its partners including:

  • DMP Tool: to help prepare and save data management plans for your grant applications
  • EZID: to create and manage unique, persistent, and citable identifiers for your data
  • Merritt: to manage, preserve, and/or share your data

Please see our Scientific Data Services for more information on these tools and other data management services.