The HSHSL is celebrating International Open Access (OA) Week with a five-day challenge designed to improve discovery of your scholarly work! Each day we will email you with a brief but meaningful activity, including: 

• Creating an ORCiD and connecting it to your Scopus author profile 
• Locating OA journals in your research area 
• Learning about repositories and data sharing 
• Utilizing MyNCBI 

If you complete any of the activities and fill out our evaluation survey at the end of the challenge, you will be entered to win some library swag! 

Sign up to receive daily challenges from October 20-24, 2025.

If you want to learn more about how the HSHSL supports Open Access, visit the Open Access LibGuide.

Contact publishing@hshsl.umaryland.edu with questions.

Love Data Week (Feb. 10 to 14) is an international celebration of all things data! Each year, the Data and Bioinformation Services team at the Health Sciences and Human Services Library looks forward to engaging the University on issues like data management, sharing, wrangling, and visualization, as well as open and reproducible science. 

This year’s theme is “Whose Data Is It, Anyway?” which asks us to consider “who owns data compared to who uses data” and to think about “where the data came from before using it.” 

Check out the week’s events below: 

• Join us for virtual Data Management Planning Office Hours on Tuesday, Feb. 11, from 9:30 to 11 a.m. to ask your specific data management and sharing questions. Zoom link
• Talk with librarians about data services at our pop-up table at your school during the week of Feb. 10 (schedule below).  Come and learn about data and bioinformation services at the HSHSL and grab a piece (or three) of candy! 
  • School of Pharmacy – Monday, Feb. 10, Noon to 1 p.m. (Atrium) 
  • [CANCELLED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER] School of Dentistry – Tuesday, Feb. 11, Noon to 1 p.m. (Ground Floor) 
  • [CANCELLED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER] School of Nursing – Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2 to 3 p.m. (1st Floor Lobby)  
  • School of Social Work – Wednesday, Feb. 12 at 11:15 a.m to 12:15 p.m. (Atrium) 
  • School of Medicine – Thursday, Feb. 13 at Noon to 1 p.m. (Bressler Lobby) 
• Gear up for Valentine’s Day by celebrating at the HSHSL on Thursday, Feb. 13, 9:30 to 11 a.m.! Join us on the 1st Floor to grab a doughnut and coffee, talk about your data needs, and participate in a special self-care activity in the Weise Gallery.

Looking for more ways to participate? 

• Visit the UMB Data Catalog. Explore the great research being done at UMB. Talk to us about cataloging your datasets! For more on the Data Catalog check out this video introduction! 
• Adopt a Dataset or attend a webinar with ICPSR, the official Love Data Week organizers and an excellent place to find data! Visit their site for more information. 
• Join our friends at the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) throughout the week for their series of workshops on topics including tools for finding and sharing data, data visualizations in Excel, and From Data to Knowledge to Equitable Health Transformation in the Age of AI. (Note: You must sign up for a free NNLM account to register).
  [THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED]

Don’t forget to follow the HSHSL and Love Data Week on social media! #LoveData25 #UMBLovesData 

Questions? Contact Amy Yarnell, Head of Data and Bioinformation Services, and Christine Nieman Hislop, Data Services Librarian at data@hshsl.umaryland.edu. 

Every month, we will be highlighting new datasets added to the UMB Data Catalog. The UMB Data Catalog facilitates discovery of data by providing a searchable and browsable collection of records describing datasets generated by UMB researchers. Sharing a record of your data in the Catalog is also a great way to demonstrate compliance with data sharing policies!

These latest records showcase data on opioid treatment availability, COVID-19 misinformation on TikTok, and immune response in HIV-infected patients.

Congrats to our UMB researchers on these publications!

Title:  County-level factors associated with a mismatch between opioid overdose mortality and availability of opioid treatment facilities
Description: Identifies characteristics of United States (US) counties with high rates of opioid overdose mortality and low rates of opioid treatment facilities.
Authors: John G. Rizk, Jannat Saini, Kyungha Kim, Uzma Pathan, Danya M. Qato
URL: https://datacatalog.hshsl.umaryland.edu/dataset/224

Title: #Coronavirus on TikTok: user engagement with misinformation as a potential threat to public health behavior
Description: Examines factors associated with user engagement with COVID-related misinformation on the social media platform, TikTok.
Authors: Jonathan D. Baghdadi, K.C. Coffey, Rachael Belcher, James Frisbie, Naeemul Hassan, Danielle Sim, Rena D. Malik
URL: https://datacatalog.hshsl.umaryland.edu/dataset/225

Title:  IFNa induces CCR5 in CD4+ T cells of HIV patients causing pathogenic elevation
Description: Investigates whether elevated circulating interferon-alpha (IFNα) promotes widespread immune cell alterations and persists post-therapy, furthering understanding of why non-elite controller (EC) HIV patients continue to need treatment.
Authors: Hélène Le Buanec, Valérie Schiavon, Marine Merandet, Alexandre How-Kit, Hongshuo Song, David Bergerat, Céline Fombellida-Lopez, Armand Bensussan, Jean-David Bouaziz, Arsène Burny, Gilles Darcis, Mohammad M. Sajadi, Shyamasundaran Kottilil, Daniel Zagury, Robert C. Gallo
URL: https://datacatalog.hshsl.umaryland.edu/dataset/226

Thanks to Metadata Librarian, Eva Greitzer for creating and compiling these records!

Want to see your data listed in the UMB Data Catalog? Submit this form to get the process started.

Questions? Email us at data@hshsl.umaryland.edu.

The Center for Data and Bioinformation Services (CDABS) will be holding two R workshops in July. The sessions will be held in-person at the HSHSL on July 24th and July 25th from 12:00pm to 2:00pm . Space is limited so register now!

R is an open-source programming language that is ideal for working with statistics and data. Here at CDABS, we love R for many reasons: It's free, flexible, and friendly! In this series, we will focus on the Tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed for data science. The Tidyverse makes data manipulation, exploration, and visualization simple and intuitive. These packages provide excellent tools for cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, all while writing readable and maintainable code. Sign up for one or both sessions, but be advised that the second session will require a minimal familiarity with R.

See full session descriptions below and register here:

July 24 Data Wrangling with R -- Introduction to the Tidyverse

This session will introduce participants to the basics of getting started with R and RStudio and introduce the workhorse package dplyr.  Participants will get hands-on experience wrangling real datasets.

Topics covered include:

• Navigating RStudio
• Key R concepts and terminology
• Importing data from external files
• Subsetting and filtering data
• Split-Apply-Combine analysis workflow

Prerequisites: none

July 25 Data Visualization in R with ggplot2

Learn how to use ggplot2, a robust Tidyverse package  used to create high quality graphics for exploring and communicating your data. We will go beyond basic graphs and learn how to customize and annotate our graphs for more effective storytelling. Participants will have the best experience if they attended session one in this series or have some previous experience with R and the Tidyverse.

Topics covered include:

• Visualization best practices
• Grammar of graphics - ggplot2 layers, aesthetics, and geoms
• Choosing an effective graph type for your data
• Customizing labels, axes, legends, and more
• Choosing a color palette and themes

Prerequisites: Session one in this series, or familiarity with navigating RStudio and basic concepts in R.

Questions? Contact: Amy Yarnell, data services librarian at data@hshsl.umaryland.edu.

The Center for Data and Bioinformation Services (CDABS) is the University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library hub for data and bioinformation learning, services, resources, and communication

Sign up to get DABS delivered to your email or RSS feed.