Renaine Julian (B.S. Political Science ‘07, M.S. Urban and Regional Planning ‘11, MLIS ‘14), Director of STEM Libraries, has recently secured a $471,847 grant for the FAIR Facilities and Instruments Research Coordination Network in collaboration with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado Boulder.
As Director of STEM Libraries, Julian leads a team of staff and librarians that supports the research, teaching, and learning needs of STEM researchers at FSU. He stated, “Our team supports scholars in traditional ways such as finding scholarly information or managing citations but includes new activities that support scholars’ changing needs. We also partner with faculty on research and learning pursuits such as workshop series or grants like this one.”
Julian also explained that, currently, his team is focused on enabling and facilitating more open science and research. This focus is further supported by the recent grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). “The grant,” Julian explained, “will concentrate on building a research coordination network (RCN) that focuses on the creation and assignment of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research facilities and instruments. PIDs will increase awareness of open science related to instrument tracking and provide for transparent instrument data provenance and research. They also will enhance the discoverability of existing instruments, equipment and data, which will streamline scientific research production and open science practices.”
Over the next few years, this team will work to connect with other scientists and researchers through hosting workshops and focus groups as well as presenting at industry and trade conferences in order to create an engaged community and gain feedback on the standardization and adoption of PID’s. He explained the impact he hopes the work will have saying, “This project, and the others that were awarded as part of the grant, are examples where librarians and scientists can partner to make science more accessible and the practice of scientific research more equitable. Our specific project has the potential to jumpstart collaborations and will certainly save researchers time and money in the future.”