On May 20, 2013, at 11:17 AM, James Frew wrote:

> On 2013-05-20 06:11, Joe Hourcle wrote:
>> On May 20, 2013, at 8:31 AM, Susan Manuel wrote:
>>> At Loughborough University we have been having some discussions about ways of assessing the usage and impact of data shared online. One of the things we talked about was having a registration system for accessing research data and we wondered what you think of this. We can see some obvious benefits to knowing who is accessing and using these data, particularly if individuals can be contacted and are willing to provide a testimonial/impact case study. Other benefits might be in providing evidence of use/impact to secure on-going institutional support for RDM and contact with data users may identify opportunities for future collaboration.
>> (basically, data providers need to make it easier for researchers to cite their data, by giving clear instructions on how they want it to be cited, and assign DOIs so that journals are more likely to accept it as a citation)
> 
> Exactly. Citations to your data in published research are *way* more impressive than anecdotal "nuggets". And tracking DOIs will make it obvious who your *real* users are.

We should be careful about saying that only one group are legitimate users of the data.

There was an interesting talk at last month's IA Summit on 'negative personas', where Annie Drynan talked about designing for your non-primary audience:

	http://2013.iasummit.org/program/designing-for-failure/
	http://www.slideshare.net/AnnieDrynan/designing-forfailure-iasummit2013

So, for instance, for the Virtual Solar Observatory, I should probably put up a disclaimer explaining that we primarily serve raw FITS files, and assume you have IDL & SolarSoft ... if you don't, you're not likely to get anything of use back.

For those just looking for quick movies or images, they should use Helioviewer, iSWA or one of the various mission sites that support EPO (while NASA still has EPO funding).

... but that's not to say that they're not legitimate users.  Just the other day, I was watching something on TV, and saw something that was obviously a 304 Angstrom full-disk image of the sun.  (not sure if it was SDO/AIA, STEREO/SECCHI/EUVI or SOHO/EIT, due to the size they displayed it at).

Yes, it's not the intended purpose of why the instruments were built, but SOHO also wasn't designed for space weather forecasting, and that's the reason that it still has continued funding to operate.  (and it's mostly because of an instrument that during the first 15 years of the mission only had *one* peer reviewed paper published)

Scientific data might be used for decision making, education, etc ... even if it's not cited in a publication, they're all valid uses.

-Joe

ps. however, people who keep insisting that they've found 'UFOs bigger than earth traveling at multiple times the speed of light' and insist that we're lying when we point them to the page on image artifacts ( http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/artifacts/artifacts.shtml ) ... they fall into the 'anti-personas' category.