Speaker: T. Scott Plutchak, Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies, The University of Alabama at Birmingham
Data is the new bacon. Data is the hot buzzword in scholarly publishing. He is working on the infrastructure, services, and policies needed to manage data on an institutional level.
Concern about data has been around for a long time. NIH developed their first policy in 2003, but it was pretty weak. Things got serious when the public access policy became mandatory in 2009. NSF developed a data management policy in 2011, which got a little more attention.
A scholarly publishing roundtable was created in 2009, reporting in 2010, made up of university administrators, librarians, publishers, and researchers. They recommended flexible policies for each agency, developed in collaboration with their consitutencies.
Libraries should be thinking about how and where and what kinds of data they should store and manage.
My small liberal arts university probably will have to do some things with this, but not to the extent he’s talking about. This is an R1 library problem, not a library problem at large. Yet.
