Wednesday, August 3, 2016

August 2016 Newsletter

August 2016 Newsletter

Dear Experimentalists,

We have a few important events and updates we want to let you know about.

This issue contains the following:
  1. SEN Receives Award!
  2. CSDMS-SEN Meeting Recap
  3. Upcoming Webinars
  4. EarthCube All Hands Meeting Summary
  5. Selected Recent SEN Knowledge Base Entries


1.  SEN Receives Award!
The Geoscience Information Society Best Paper Committee chose a paper by the SEN leadership for their 2016 award.  The paper, published in Geomorphology and entitled “Data Management, sharing, and reuse in experimental geomorphology: Challenges, strategies, and scientific opportunities”, can be found here.

One of the award selection committee members wrote:
 “I think it addresses an important topic for both scientists and librarians/libraries, it covers the needs and challenges of this topic, proposes guidelines/suggestions, addresses incentives and training, and discusses the importance of data publication in the scientific process. I also feel that the authors did a great job reviewing the literature including research in their scientific field and research in the library and data science literature”

This is the Geoscience Information Society’s 50th Anniversary and will be presented during the GSA Annual Meeting in Denver.

2.  CSDMS-SEN Meeting Recap
This year SEN co-hosted the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System’s (CSDMS) annual meeting held on May 17-19th, 2016 in Boulder, Colorado, with over 120 people were in attendance.  SEN’s own Wonsuck Kim presented a keynote talk (click link to see presentation) about “Overcoming Grand Challenges by Collaboration between Experimentalists and Modelers”.   SEN also hosted a clinic to demonstrate the experimental data lifecycle and promote experimentalist-modeler collaboration through the use of the Knowledge Base.  Through this clinic we were able to obtain community feedback on the Knowledge Base site (www.sedexp.net), which we have already started to implement.  For more detailed information about the meeting, including major outcomes, please see our full workshop report.

3.  Upcoming Webinars
The EarthCube Science Committee is excited to announce the next in its series of "EarthCube Tools" webinars, which will be useful for any scientists needing to manage or share their research data:

Title: EarthCollab: Enabling Scientific Collaboration and Discovery Through Linked Scientific Resources

Date/time: Friday, August 5, at 2 pm EDT (1 PM CDT, 12 PM MDT, 11 AM PDT/MST, 8 AM HST)

Presenter: Matthew Mayernik, NCAR

Description: The EarthCollab project is improving the discovery and sharing of information to advance research. This project is leveraging web identifier and vocabulary structures that have been widely adopted in the geoscience and cyberinfrastructure communities to facilitate exchange of information across the internet, thereby allowing research projects to leverage representations of researchers, data sets, tools, and organizations wherever they reside online.

Call-in and event details are available here.

About the webinars:
The EarthCube Tools for Doing Geoscience webinar series, organized by the Science Committee of the NSF-sponsored EarthCube program, provides practical demonstrations of how EarthCube projects can help you to collect, access, share, and visualize geoscience data. Each webinar begins with a showcase of an EarthCube funded project followed by ample time for questions and conversation. Wary of EarthCube jargon? Presenters will describe their projects in plain English for scientists in all disciplines who may be unfamiliar with EarthCube. Here’s a chance for you (and your colleagues, team members, and students) to learn about EarthCube and how it can help to advance your scientific work. More information on the webinar series is available here. Archived video will be available on the website about one week after the webinar.

We are also excited to announce an upcoming webinar training on the Open Science Framework (OSF).

Title: OSF 101 Webinar

Date/time: Tuesday, August 9, at 1 pm EDT (12 PM CDT, 11 AM MDT, 10 AM PDT/MST, 7 AM HST)

Description: This webinar is an introduction to using the Open Science Framework (OSF; https://osf.io) - a free, open source web application built to help researchers manage their workflows. The OSF is part collaboration tool, part version control software, and part data archive. The OSF connects to popular tools researchers already use, like Dropbox, Box, Github and Mendeley, to streamline workflows and increase efficiency. This webinar will get you up to speed on using the OSF, show helpful tips and tricks, and give you a launching pad for managing your first OSF project!

Registration and event details are available here.

4.  EarthCube All Hands Meeting Summary
This past July, EarthCube hosted its annual All Hands Meeting in Denver, CO.  The theme for this year's meeting was "EarthCube Connects," which emphasizes the connectivity between cyberinfrastructure (CI) technologies, geoscience domains, and geoscientists that will drive EarthCube's implementation. It also captures the goal of building a system of systems that supports cross-disciplinary research. SEN was in attendance and presented on our progress over the past year.  For more information on meeting, please see the AGU blog post.

5.  Selected recent SEN Knowledge Base entries

For up to date information about SEN, please check out our blog at http://sedimentexperiments.blogspot.com/ and follow us on Twitter (@sedimentexp).

Happy experimenting,
The Sediment Experimentalist Network