The study — The impact of public data archiving policies on attitudes, experiences, and practices of authors — explores the impact of journal policies on the attitudes, experiences, and practices of active scientists.

For the next three years, I’ll invite corresponding authors from selected journals to take an online questionnaire.  The goal of the study is to see how author attitudes, experiences, and practices evolve over time as journal data sharing policies come into effect.

For more information, please see the study website.  You can also subscribe to news updates on the study via email or RSS.

This study will provide important and useful evidence around actual data sharing practices, rewards, and obstacles to inform future policy development and implementation.  I look forward to reporting the results in a few years!

SIG USE is a special interest group of ASIS&T, focusing on information needs seeking and use.

The full text of the proposal is on my blog.  I look forward to getting started on the project.  Comments and suggestions for improvement are most welcome.

Thank you, SIG USE!

I’m thrilled to have begun a Postdoctoral Research Associate position with DataONE and Dryad and NESCent.  Todd Vision found me towards the end of my PhD (via a tweet!), and suggested that this postdoc spot might be a good fit for my research interests.  He couldn’t have been more right.

To top it off, I’m working on this postdoc-of-my-dreams remotely, from my home in Vancouver, Canada.  I have a local base in Mike Whitlock‘s lab in the Biodiversity Research Centre in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia.

This is a shift in domain for me:  I’ll be focusing on data sharing and reuse in ecology and evolution rather than biomedicine.  Lots of reading ahead.

I look forward to making real contributions to the success of the DataONE and Dryad projects through original research in data sharing and reuse.  Stay tuned…

yay done

I graduated with my PhD from the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

I successfully defended my thesis, entitled “Foundational studies for measuring the impact, prevalence, and patterns of publicly sharing biomedical research data”, on March 24rd, 2010 under the supervision of my dissertation advisor Dr Wendy Chapman.

More information on my dissertation is available here.

My thesis is dedicated to two people:

my daughter Kira, without whom I’d never have started

and my husband John, without whom I’d never have finished.

I sincerely thank Dr Wendy Chapman, DBMI, the NLM, and all of the people and organizations who supported me during this process.

yay done

Here is the proposal I submitted (shorter than the version I defended with my dissertation committee in January 2009).

My paper is a pilot study of my final thesis analysis.  It uses a smaller dataset and fewer variables than my complete Aim 3, but demonstrates the overall methodology.

We were invited to submit the paper to a special issue of the Journal of Informetrics, so keep your fingers crossed!  I’ll post the paper full-text online when I can.

Public Sharing of Research Datasets: A Pilot Study of Associations
Heather Piwowar and Wendy Chapman, University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.

Let me know if you’ll be in the audience!