Call for Papers

"Ten years back, ten years forward: achievements, lessons and the future for digital curation"

The first Digital Curation Conference took place in Bath in September 2005; one year after the Digital Curation Centre was launched.
Since the inaugural conference we have covered a range of curation issues from the simple question of "What is Digital Curation", through to more complex issues of infrastructure, radical sharing and open data and how to encourage collaboration and create a curation community. Content has covered topical research, bold looks into the future as well as distillations of lessons learnt from practice.

The Call for Papers is now open and in this our 10th year we encourage submissions that take a 10-year view whether into the past, present or future. Our emphasis is on how we move forward building on what we’ve learned. Contributors are invited to reflect on the changes they have seen in a number of different areas (listed below), to consider the likely developments in these areas and the emerging challenges in the next decade.

Proposers should identify the session theme they most closely align with and submit using the templates provided on the Submissions page. Different lengths of abstract are required based on the type of submission being made. For information about the key submission dates check the Dates page.

We're pleased to announce the introduction of two new submission formats: Birds of a Feather sessions and data papers. Further details at the end of the page

Session themes

A decade of data curation

Papers should reflect on the developments that have taken place in the area of digital curation over the past ten years, and the implications these have for the future; reflections and synthesis of what has happened are welcome but all should aim to draw on this to identify future and current perspectives and action:

1. Whatever happened to...?
2. What were the lasting trends and passing phases?
3. What lessons have we learned?
4. What are the major advances that have been made?
5. What are the next big challenges we need to tackle?

Curation Infrastructure

Papers should describe institutional, consortia, national or international infrastructure supporting digital curation and research data management:

1. Tools, systems and services that are in development
2. Evaluations of existing tools
3. Proposals for new approaches to large-scale service delivery
4. Cutting edge research and exploration into new curation methods

Education and Training

Papers should explore the education and training needs of digital or data curators, researchers (in the area of data management), or the staff that support them:

1. What knowledge and skills do they need?
2. How effective are current courses in delivering such knowledge and skills?
3. What best practice is being established in educating and training these groups? What innovations are being explored?
4. What is the trajectory that courses should follow?
5. What skills do curators, researchers & support staff need now, what will they need in   future?
6. What methods are most effective? e.g. immersive/embedded approaches, co-location?

Sustainability and strategy

Papers should consider how digital curation and research data management activities can be sustained and developed in the medium to long term:

1. Analyses of the costs and benefits of curation
2. Demonstrations of return on investment
3. Case studies on the value of open data
4. Cost and funding models
5. Business planning

 Working with challenging data

Papers should discuss work with particularly challenging or specialist forms of data:

1. Data on a large scale – big data or large collections of long tail data
2. Complex data, models and formats
3. Disciplinary data

Sharing data

Papers should tackle issues associated with making data visible to, accessible to and usable by others:

1. The data publication process in general, or more specific aspects of it such as: preparing data for reuse, quality control of data (peer review, integrity checks), data citation, data reproducibility and validation
2. Measuring the impact and reuse of data by traditional or alternative metrics
3. Case studies on data reuse and usability and impact

Legal and ethical issues

Papers should consider legal and ethical issues including:

1. Security
2. Privacy
3. Personalised medicine
4. Clinical data
5. Identity issues

New submission formats

We invite a number of submission formats, including papers, posters, demos and workshops. We are also experimenting with a couple of new formats this year: Birds of a Feather sessions and data papers. 

• Birds of a Feather will be 60 minute sessions that bring together individuals interested in a given topic relevant to the conference and suitable for discussion and networking. They will provide an open forum for exploring issues and questions. Speakers will be given a maximum of 20 minutes to present the topic and the remaining time will be for audience discussion.
• Data papers will be short talks describing your datasets, how they were collected and the potential for reuse. The data should have been prepared for sharing and deposited in a recognised repository. Data papers will be grouped together as series of short 'lightning talks', separate to the other thematic sessions in the conference. As such, the abstracts don't need to align with one of the session themes.

​For further details see the submissions page.