Call for papers (closed)

Collaborations and Partnerships: addressing the big digital challenges together

The central focus of IDCC19 is to examine collaborations and partnerships in the field of digital curation and preservation. How do they develop and evolve across the professional, disciplinary, institutional, regional, national, and international levels? And how are such collaborations supporting the advancement of digital curation and preservation practices? The DCC is partnering with the University of Melbourne to take the IDCC to Australia in 2019 and this is a context where such collaborations and links with the wider international research data community are key.

With unparalleled data volumes, increasing costs and an ever-reducing funding pool, there is a strong imperative to partner and collaborate across domains, institutions and regions. Partnerships and collaborations are particularly evident in the higher-education research, public libraries and archives sectors. Individuals play a key role too and may see their work being adopted by other sectors or influencing how we address grand challenges.

The data stewardship role creates endless opportunities for preserving our past and capturing the present, while also shaping the future. But this has not been by accident. Digital curation is an elegant dance between a diverse array of protagonists, working together to create the extraordinary. Partnerships and collaborations are at the core of the curation dance between these diverse stakeholders.

Papers are invited to address one or more of the topics listed below:

Grand curation challenges

• Information security and digital preservation: advancing the state-of-the-art when preserving complex and interactive digital environments
• Research data, public records & cultural heritage: common curation principles applied across diverse cultures
• Domain-specific informatics and intersects: the challenges of enabling global action on curation standards, guidance, protocols and developments
• Interdisciplinarity and interoperability: pursuing the objectives of open and FAIR data to enable data mining, machine processing and reuse at scale
• Addressing information entropy, e.g. link-rot, format and technological instability, semantic drift, and loss of intangible human knowledge
• Ethical, legal and data quality challenges: what can be open, and how to do control sharing of what cannot
• Embedding data curation within scientific tools and workflows to increase adoption
• Establishing a DMP culture: common standards, open publication and data exchange across systems
• Costing data curation activities and securing resources for sustainable services

Building diverse and inclusive communities

• Who is at your table and who should be? Initiatives to increase diversity
• Cross-sectoral collaborations: how other domains advance our thinking
• The role of international policy fora and bottom-up, community-led approaches
• Keeping the spark alive: strengthening and maintaining group relationships
• Lessons learned and hard-won from community initiatives

Examples and models

• Examples of collaboration, partnerships and community development
• Networks in digital preservation, curation and research data management
• Value propositions for collaborations or partnerships
• Lessons from shared services, institutional consortia and commercial partnerships
• Training initiatives, skills and knowledge sharing across organisations
• Testbeds, labs and R&D on digital preservation, curation and data management
• Key performance indicators for institutional research data management services

Good foundations for working together

• DMPs as a bridge to discuss, partner and engage research communities and institutional stakeholders such as enterprise risk management, research integrity and good research practice offices in RDM
• Platforms and services: collaborations around Open Source solutions, service evaluation / comparison exercises, lessons from contracting / tendering processes
• Ethics and responsibility: mechanisms to ensure appropriate data handling, access and reuse
• Research transparency, reproducibility and trust: steps to ensure the integrity and rigour of scientific data
• Effective training and service evaluation: engaging partners & communities for awareness, uptake and quality
• Developing tools and approaches to skills development: competencies, capabilities and curricular frameworks

Submissions

We accept a variety of bubmission formats - papers, posters, demonstrations, workshops. Please visit the submissions page for details on how to submit and deadlines.

Submissions