Data Conservancy, IEEE, & Portico Receive $602,000 Sloan Foundation Grant to Connect Publications and their Linked Data

Note: The project discussed below is named “The Matchmaker Project” and will be discussed in a presentation by Portico’s Kate Wittenberg tomorrow at the STM Annual U.S. Spring Conference 2014 in Washington, DC.  We hope to update this post with her slides as soon as they become available.  
From Today’s Announcement:

The Data Conservancy [based at Johns Hopkins U. in Baltimore], IEEE, and Portico announced today their partnership to design and prototype a data curation infrastructure that connects published research and associated data sets for the long-term benefit of researchers worldwide.
This two-year project, which is supported by a $602,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will result in the development of a service that will build, store, update, and retrieve the connections among publications and data, and preserve those connections over the long-term.
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This project will make it possible to preserve not just these publications and their underlying data, but the complex relationships among them, thereby supporting the continual development of scholarly communication and digital publishing. A publisher who wants to know if there are reference links to data for a publication, for example, submits article metadata and identifiers to the service, which returns any relationships it finds, thus making it possible to track and preserve these connections through the scholarly communications cycle.

Comments From People Involved in the Project

Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for research data management and Hodson director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, noted, “We believe that the models developed as a result of this project will enable new forms of scholarly communication, and thus help to set the stage for the future of research and digital publishing. Our partnership represents broad perspectives and multifaceted experience, which we believe will result in more meaningful solutions that can be generalized for the entire community.”
“The research community has an immediate and pressing need to make the most effective use of the relationship between publications and their corresponding data,” commented Kate Wittenberg, managing director of Portico. “As scholars continue to explore the possibilities presented by these relationships, it is incumbent on us, their colleagues, to develop a creative vision and infrastructure to support their work.”
“Our aim is not only to preserve publications and data—either separately or together—but to preserve the relationships among them,” commented Gerry Grenier, senior director of publishing technologies at IEEE. “This project represents a big step forward in greater discovery, access, and preservation.”

Filed under: Data Files, Funding, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Preservation, Publishing, Scholarly Communications