Researchers face many obstacles when utilizing large data sets and computational research in their findings, including how to provide access to data and software used to create published results, and what metadata and tools should accompany digital published research.

Victoria Stodden, associate professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will tackle some of these challenges when she speaks at Virginia Tech this week as part of the University Libraries’ Open Access Week.

Stodden’s keynote address is set for 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, in Davidson Hall, room 281, at 1040 Drillfield Drive in Blacksburg. The event is free and open to the public.

Stodden’s talk, “Scholarly Communication in the Era of Big Data and Big Computation” will also outline how researchers can use reproducibility to frame a scholarly record that incorporates computational research.

“Many challenges and opportunities exist in sharing and communicating the results of data-intensive and computational research,” said Tyler Walters, dean of the University Libraries and director of SHARE. “We hope Dr. Stodden’s perspective as a leading scholar in computational science and reproducible research will challenge us all to think more creatively about how open and transparent research practices can help to reduce barriers to advancing science and new forms of scholarly expression."

Stodden, who received both her Ph.D. in statistics and Juris Doctor law degree from Stanford University, focuses her research on the complex problem of enabling reproducibility in computational science. She is the developer of the “Reproducible Research Standard,” a suite of open licensing recommendations for the dissemination of computational results, founder of open source platform researchcompendia.org, co-founder of RunMyCode.org, an open platform connecting data and code to published articles, and creator and curator of SparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research in underdetermined systems.

This event is a part of the University Libraries’ annual Open Access Week celebration and is sponsored by the University Libraries, Computational Modeling and Data Analytics, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Statistics, the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA), and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

For more information and additional Open Access Week events, please visit the Open Access Week page.

Free parking is available after 5 p.m. along the Drillfield and in the Davidson and Hahn lots along West Campus Drive. Find more parking information online, or call 540-231-3200. If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact Philip Young at 540-231-8845 during regular business hours prior to the event.

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