It's Research Week, and UQ Library is launching a new Research Data Collections form in eSpace. The new form will allow researchers and research groups to describe their data according to good practice.

UQ eSpace can now support either open access or mediated access to your research data collections, and aid the discovery, dissemination and preservation of research data as a first class research output at UQ.

Data publishing has been gaining momentum, due to an increasing awareness of the benefits in publishing and re-using data, alongside the growing requirements of funding bodies that data be made publicly available. By publishing your research data you can:

Figshare Partners with Open Access mega journal publisher PLOS

Figshare announced this week that they have gone into partnership with PLOS to host the supplemental data for all seven PLOS journals. For ease of access to view the data, PLOS will provide a widget, which will allow the users to view the data alongside the content.

The National Academies Press has published a compendium of academic thinking about sharing academic data, "The Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Networked Environments: Summary of a Workshop." It is available to download free as a PDF.

The Denton Declaration: an Open Data Manifesto, is the latest announcement on the growing debate on open data.

The declaration includes:

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR) is a research data repository helping accelerate scientific discovery in autism research.

NDAR provides the infrastructure to store, search across, and analyse various types of data. In addition, NDAR provides longitudinal storage of a research participant's information generated by one or more research studies.

In The Conversation on the 26th September 2012, Alex O. Holcombe and Matthew Todd published an open letter to the Australian Research Council on why scientific data should be shared.

The latest Australian National Data Service (ANDS) newsletter is now available. This issue examines research data from the perspective of researchers.

Including:

• International partnerships.
• Enabling new and efficient research.
• Big data.
• International engagement.
• Up and coming events.

In what could be an about-face for the Australian Research Council, new chief executive Aidan Byrne is re-examining the organisation's stance on open-access publications.
Read the full article by Luke Le Grand in The Australian.