By IQ Editors | June 25, 2025
Dear IASSISTers,
Welcome to IASSIST Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 2 .
It was wonderful to meet so many colleagues and to make new connections at the Best IASSIST Ever! in Bristol, UK. It is always exciting to learn about the innovative work that is being done by members of this community.
We would like to encourage those who presented at the conference to turn their conference presentation or poster into a paper and submit it to IQ . This will allow you to share your research and expertise with a wider audience.
We had several excellent submissions to this year’s IASSIST Conference Paper Competition. If you were not able to attend the conference, you may have missed the announcement about the 2025 competition’s winner. And the winner is:
Assessing data management and sharing plans: The “state of play” at Duke and opportunities for cross-campus collaborations.
Authored by Sophia Lafferty-Hess, William Krenzer, Jenny Ariansen, Jennifer Darragh.
The paper describes a collaborative effort by the Duke University Libraries and the Duke Office of Scientific Integrity (DOSI) to better understand the status of data management and sharing plans submitted from Duke to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2021. It presents key findings from the data management and sharing plans (DMSP) assessment project and describes how this information can be used to plan ongoing education, training, and resource development using a cross-campus collaboration model.
Congratulations to this year’s winning authors! The award for IASSIST Conference Paper Competition winner includes free registration for the first author to the following year’s IASSIST conference, in addition to bragging rights.
We are thankful to Meryl Brodsky, the competition coordinator, Lauren Phegley, last year’s paper competition winner, and René Duplain, who joined the journal’s editors in reviewing the competition submissions.
We encourage all the paper competition authors to submit their manuscripts to IQ and we look forward to publishing them in future IQ issues.
The four papers included in the current issue, IQ 49(2), highlight innovative approaches to enhancing research practices and infrastructure across diverse domains within the social sciences. Together, these works underscore the importance of data standardization, literacy, and community engagement in promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing.
In their article Using common data elements to foster interoperability of research on health disparities, Megan Chenoweth and John Kubale discuss the use of common data elements (CDEs) to support health disparities research in social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) research. The authors describe their process for identifying, validating, and building consensus on CDEs related to COVID public health policies.
In The role of FAIR principles in high-quality research data documentation: Looking at national election studies, author Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen uses national election studies as a case study to compare between manual and automatic assessments of FAIRness scores. The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) standards are among the core principles used for improving open science and research data management. Technological developments may allow improvements of their application.
Margaret Marchant and C. Jeffrey Belliston in their paper Data literacy in undergraduate research: A case study from student poster competitions make use of information collected from undergraduate poster competitions, which is a common way for undergraduate students to share research, to examine data literacy skills of undergraduate students at Brigham Young University. The authors identify strengths and gaps in data literacy education and offer suggestions for supporting and encouraging undergraduate research and data literacy development beyond the traditional area of data analysis.
The last article in this issue departs from our usual topics, but we felt it was important to include it. Authors Priya Silverstein, Julia G. Bottesini, Sebastian Karcher, and Colin Elman, in their paper Introducing the Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI), acquaint us with the online community they have helped found for journal editors in the social sciences, launched in 2021. JEDI aims to increase uptake of open science at social science journals by providing journal editors with a space to learn and discuss. The paper explores JEDI’s progress in its first two years, presenting data on membership, posts, and from a members’ survey.
We, editors of the IQ, found feedback from the JEDI community to be not only informative and helpful but actually crucial at times since we became aware of it in March 2024. We publish it here not only as a window for readers into our world, but also as a potentially informative item for those of you who may be serving with other journals’ editorial staff or boards or have such people in your circles.
We hope you enjoy reading and wish you a productive summer.
Michele Hayslett and Ofira Schwartz, June 2025
Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. Authors may take a look at the instructions and layout . We are available via e-mail for questions, or proposals for special issues: editor.iassistquarterly ( at ) gmail.com.