Data sets in eCommons
Did you know Cornellians are using eCommons, Cornell University Library’s institutional repository, as a means for providing access to digital research data? Here are a few interesting examples:
- A collection of data sets related to Cayuga Lake, including data from water quality monitoring associated with Cornell’s Lake Source Cooling project.
- Data sets from the Agriculture, Energy & the Environment Program (AEEP), a program that aims to better understand “the interaction of energy and agriculture as these affect environmental quality in the rural environments of New York State (NYS) and downstream coastal regions.”
- Data sets from the Cornell Biological Field Station (CBFS), Cornell’s fisheries and aquatic ecology research station on Oneida Lake.
- Vascular Plant Species of the Cayuga Region of New York State, a data set that supports a paper published in the Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society in 2008.
To support this need to distribute research data online, we developed a brief policy on depositing data in eCommons, as well as language that researchers can include in grant proposals that require data management plans. Currently, we are doing some research to inform the development of additional policies or features to make our repositories more “data friendly.” Stay tuned.
– Gail Steinhart
A short podcast on “Inside Higher Ed” features another example of some research with data in eCommons: http://www.insidehighered.com/audio/2012/11/14/loons-and-deadly-combat. Walter Chapman, the speaker in the podcast, is a long-time collaborator of Professor Emeritus in Neurobiology & Behavior Charles Walcott. They’ve used eCommons to make the audio and related data for their research widely available: http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/13094