The announcement below summarizes a range of useful material on European Union level work on scientific data management and preservation that has been produced as a result of a project called PARSE.Insight.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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After two years of research, the European project PARSE.Insight held its final symposium on 25 June 2010. The project results were received with enthusiasm by Brussels’ EC representative Carlos Morais-Pires who stated to be ‘very happy to have facts about the situation in research and to receive recommendations for the science data infrastructure in Europe’.

Ten major insights in research were presented, amongst these major gaps between European countries in how to deal with research data and researchers’ reluctance to share their data while they certainly want others’ data. These findings were enforced by the outcomes of three case studies in High-Energy Physics, Earth Observation and Social Sciences and Humanities.

In conjunction with these insights the final roadmap for a science data infrastructure in Europe has been published. Aside from technical aspects this also addresses organisational as well as social aspects such as incentives for researchers to increase their willingness to share their data. Furthermore, the gap analysis tool was presented which helps analysts to find weak spots and contradictions in stakeholder communities.

Please visit our website for downloading the PARSE.Insight reports:
http://www.parse-insight.eu/publications.php

Apart from these documents, PARSE.Insight created an online visualisation of actors putting effort in digital preservation. This Interactive Map is a first attempt to give an overview of who is playing an important role in research to digital preservation. Via this map researchers, data managers, publishers, funders and other stakeholders that would like to learn more about best practices in preservation can look for an organisation in their country or discipline.

On behalf of the project team,

David Giaretta

About PARSE.insight
PARSE.Insight was a two-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme. It is concerned with the preservation of digital information in science, from primary data through analysis to the final publications resulting from the research. The problem is how to safeguard this valuable digital material over time, to ensure that it is accessible, usable and understandable in future. The rapid pace of change in information technology threatens media, file formats and software with obsolescence, and changing concepts and terminology also mean that, even if data can be read, it might not be correctly interpreted by future generations.
Many initiatives are already under way in this area. Therefore, PARSE.Insight aimed to develop a roadmap and recommendations for developing the science data infrastructure in order to maintain the long-term accessibility and usability of scientific digital information in Europe. The project conducted surveys and in-depth case studies of different scientific disciplines and stakeholders and based its results on these findings, as well as knowledge of ongoing developments.
The consortium consists of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC, coordination), National Library of the Netherlands (KB), German National Library (DNB), Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG), International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), European Space Agency ESRIN (ESA), FernUniversitat in Hagen (FUH), European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen Stiftung Oeffentlichen Rechts (UGOE).
PARSE.Insight is closely linked to the Alliance for Permanent Access to the Records of Science (http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.eu/). The output from the project is intended to guide the European Commission’s strategy about research infrastructure.