If you use the DMP Assistant to support data management planning, please note two upcoming maintenance windows for the DMP Assistant service as it migrates to new infrastructure:
April 30, 2025 12:00-14:00 ET/9:00-11:00 AM PT
We will be performing maintenance during this window, and users may experience minor issues. We do not expect significant down time. Updates will be posted at this link: https://status.alliancecan.ca/
view_incident?incident=1314 May 15, 2025 12:00-14:30 ET/9:00-11:30 PT
This will be a complete outage of the DMP Assistant service. This time will be used for essential work and completion of the migration. Updates will be posted at this link: https://status.alliancecan.ca/
view_incident?incident=1316
UBC Data Bites workshops are now available for sign up for the summer term, and open to the public. These workshops support skill building in a wide range of research data management topics and task.
Session topics and registration:
Porter, S.R. Understanding ORCID adoption among academic researchers. Scientometrics (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05300-7
Abstract:
ORCID has proven essential in identifying individual researchers and their publications, both for bibliometric research analyses and for universities and other organizations tracking the research productivity and impact of their personnel. Yet widespread adoption of the ORCID by individual researchers has proved elusive, with previous studies finding adoption rates ranging from 3% to 42%. Using a national survey of U.S. academic researchers at 31 research universities, we investigate why some researchers adopt an ORCID and some do not. We found an overall adoption rate of 72%, with adoptions rates ranging between academic disciplines from a low of 17% in the visual and performing arts to a high of 93% in biological and biomedical sciences. Many academic journals require an ORCID to submit a manuscript, and this is the main reason why researchers adopt an ORCID. The top three reasons for not having an ORCID are not seeing the benefits, being far enough in the academic career to not need it, and working in an academic discipline where it is not needed.
Full article:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-025-05300-7
Recordings from WestDRI's seminar series are made available through their YouTube channel.
WestDRI is part of the Research Computing Group at SFU (https://www.rcg.sfu.ca), offers a range of tutorials and online workshops targeted at helping researchers learn about and use SFU and Digital Research Alliance of Canada (https://alliancecan.ca) computing resources, as well as advanced skills in computational research.
Sessions range in length from 30 minutes to two hours and are delivered online via Zoom. For more information, visit https://training.westdri.ca or email training@westdri.ca.
A webinar offering from Advanced Research Computing training in Western Canada, organized by SFU on behalf of Western Universities:
Next Tuesday, April 22nd, please join us for the webinar "Cybersecurity Hygiene" with Scott Baker, at 10am Pacific / 11am Mountain and Saskatoon / 12pm Winnipeg time. To register, visit this page, or follow the link from our winter/spring 2025 webinar schedule.
Abstract: We all face a daily barrage of news about information cybersecurity: from hackers to breaches, flaws and vulnerabilities etc... This seemingly endless stream of content can lead to fear, confusion and even denial or abstinence from taking action. There are simple things everyone can do to be more secure. This session will provide an institutional-policy-agnostic, practical set of suggestions and plain language explanations of what can be done by individuals and teams within and outside the work environment and why each is important.
The 2025 winter/spring webinars are jointly presented by SFU's Research Computing Group and UBC's Advanced Research Computing.
CAUT reports that Canadian working on projects funded wholly or in part by American federal agencies have been sent a lengthy questionnaire to determine how their work aligns with the Trump administration’s political agenda:
In the questionnaire, Canadian researchers are asked to confirm that their research:
does not include a climate or “environmental justice” component
does not contain diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) elements
does not ascribe to “gender ideology”
increases American influence globally
In addition, the questionnaire asks whether a researcher’s institution has a policy prohibiting collaboration with entities contrary to U.S. government interests and prevents partnerships with “communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties.”
More:
https://www.caut.ca/latest/2025/03/trump-administration-threatening-canadian-researchers
From the Digital Research Alliance of Canada:
On February 27, 2025, the Government of Canada released their initial plans for the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Infrastructure program. The Digital Research Alliance of Canada has been in the process of reviewing the information and developing a plan around the submission of a statement of intent.
Connecting with our digital research infrastructure partners and community in this process is vital and we would like to take this opportunity to invite you to attend one of two virtual town halls to have an opportunity to hear your input and feedback, as well as share our early thoughts about the Alliance’s vision for sovereign AI compute in Canada we are working on for the proposal submission.
Virtual Town Hall #1: We welcome all national DRI users and support staff, researchers, and other public stakeholders.
Date: March 25, 2025
Time: 11 am EDT
Register here for the Virtual Town Hall #1
Virtual Town Hall #2: We welcome all prospective Canadian industry partners
Date: March 26, 2025
Time: 11 am EDT
Register here for the Virtual Town Hall #2
From the Digital Research Alliance of Canada:
This week-long workshop will introduce attendees to best practices in Research Data Management (RDM) using common tools to support research transparency and reproducibility. Robust implementation of RDM principles enables researchers to address bias and reproducibility, effectively share their research, and ensure long term access to their research inputs and outputs. From research question development to findings dissemination, RDM underpins a fruitful and successful academic career.
What will we cover?
Sessions will address the importance and underlying principles of RDM; we’ll explore issues related to RDM and the growing landscape of RDM-related requirements stemming from funders and publishers. Using the R programming language, the Open Science Framework (OSF), and Borealis (Dataverse), we’ll explore solutions to address these issues and enable compliance with funder and publisher requirements.
All attendees will work with a common dataset to explore how to ask questions of data using common computational tools. Throughout, attendees will be introduced to: the documentation and metadata requirements to ensure accessibility: considerations to address different aspects of reproducibility; practices to maintain their data’s integrity; and ways to ensure their final data deposit is adherent to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles.
Completion of the Jumpstart can be applied to the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities, and will meet the requirement for the minimum 20 hours of in-depth workshops.
Hosted by Julien McHardy and Simon Bowie at the Open Book Futures Experimental Publishing Group.
On the 23rd of May 2025, we are bringing together a group of writers, makers, and publishers to explore Markdown writing and publishing workflows for experimental digital monographs at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag. In the afternoon hybrid online session, we will share and broaden our conversation. We would be delighted to see you for the event online.
In the session, we will share and discuss our experience with Markdown publishing using the publishing platform Juncture. Juncture is a digital publishing tool developed by JSTOR Labs for visual essaying that allows the author to dynamically display text alongside a range of other media materials. You can find more information about Juncture in our Experimental Publishing Compendium.
More information:
https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/markdown-dive-deep/release/3
Registration:
https://www.eventsforce.net/cugroup/frontEnd/reg/registerNew.csp?ef_sel_menu=9520&eventID=2093