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Dealing with Data in a New Era of Research Data Management

4th August 2016
 | Katy Alexander

As part of a continuing series, we recently broadcast a Digital Science webinar on Dealing with Data in a New Era of Research Data Management. The aim of these webinars is to provide the very latest perspectives on key topics in scholarly communication.

The webinar covered a broad range of topics from data management in the US and Europe; the Horizon 2020 programme and Project THOR; open data, research data management and much more.

Laura Wheeler (@laurawheelers), Community Manager at Digital Science, started the webinar by giving a brief overview of the esteemed panel and their backgrounds before handing over to Dan Valen, from Figshare, who moderated and questioned the panel.

We were delighted to welcome Adam Farquhar, the Head of Digital Scholarship at the British Library, to start the conversation. Adam started by stating the ambitions of Project THOR, a 30-month project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme:

“Our goal is to ensure that every researcher, at any phase of their career, or at any institution, will have seamless access to Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for their research artefacts and their work will be uniquely attributed to them”

Adam then defined key characteristics of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and made sure to mention the importance of PIDs in building a concrete infrastructure for research.

So what are some of the individual goals of Project THOR? THOR aims to place PIDs at the fingertips of researchers, integrating them into services researchers already use, seamlessly integrating them amongst articles, data, and researchers. The focus areas of THOR range from the biological and medical Sciences, right through to the social Sciences and humanities.

Project THOR is not alone in its mission; Adam described its key partners’ visions in the next few presentation slides.

ORCID:

“ORCID’s vision is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations across time, disciplines, and borders”.

DataCite:

“To help the research community locate, identify, and cite research data with confidence.”

Perhaps what’s most inspiring about Adam and Project THOR, is that THOR and its partners’ collective goals are already being realised. In a wonderful snapshot from THOR’s new dashboard, it is clear to see that ORCID’s and DOI’s are on rise, and what’s more – these PIDs are being integrated into publisher databases around the world.

If you are passionate about this topic, have a story to tell, or would just like to get involved, become an ambassador and inspire like-minded individuals around you!

Next up, we had Kristin Briney, Data Services Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who started her presentation by talking about data management best practice, noting that good data management makes researchers more productive and as a consequence more happy; it also streamlines open data.

“Data management should not be a wall, rather a door to better things.”

Kristin gave a useful summary of how to manage data in her, ‘Crash Course in Data Management‘. Follow her golden standard 3-2-1 rule and you can’t go wrong: 3 copies of data, stored in 2 locations, and on more than 1 type of storage software.  She made sure to mention the importance of annotating data – without details, data is just data!

Organising your files, keeping everything up to date – old systems become obsolete very quickly in today’s world – and ironing out a security plan with your colleagues to determine who has access to your more sensitive data is equally as important. Above all, do things properly the first time around – you will need to access this data in the future. Remember, in the data game, slow and steady wins the race!

Margaret Henderson delivered her presentation after Kristin, and started by asking the question, “Who is doing data?”. Looking at a collection of results, it was easy to see that this is a growing industry with plans to expand over the coming years. Margaret then went on to cover, in significant detail, the current regulatory climate around data in the US.

“Copyright requires “creative” and “original” “expression” – data generally don’t qualify for copyright protection”.

An important point to take away from Margaret’s talk was the different situations academics face when seeking to protect and get credit for their original work. She covered the in’s and out’s of a number of grants, stating the data each grant had the rights to, and made sure to mention the importance of having a data management plan.

Margaret also looked at the key differences between public and open access to data – the key conclusion being that open access data is owned by the author versus a journal in public access.

For our final speaker, we jumped across the pond and featured a European’s perspective on data management to close the discussion. Interestingly enough, Mariette started by stating:

“There’s no single or typically European approach to either research data management or open science. Even within a small country like the Netherlands, universities and research institutes are doing things differently”

She then moved on to state her observations from Amsterdam. Firstly, she focused on researchers. A problem researchers face is the growing pressure for them to become ‘IT experts’ with a deep understanding of storing and managing data; as if that’s not enough, we also assume intellectual property legislation is a hobby of most academics! The key point being: researchers need help.

“Here in Amsterdam, we’ve chosen a three-tiered approach to research data management support: policy, infrastructure and support”.

In Amsterdam, they have chosen a three-tiered approach to research data management (RDM) support: policy, infrastructure and support. Adequate research data management policy should result from best practice – that way, a researcher’s fear of administrative tasks slowly goes into remission.

Secondly, researchers have to actually be able to follow a RDM policy.

“It’s naïve to expect an RDM policy to be adhered to if researchers aren’t enabled to do so, if technical facilities lack or fall short of what researchers need. Therefore, I consider infrastructure an important second ingredient of RDM support”.

The final part of the puzzle is having a dedicated team full of IT and legal experts that can assist and direct researchers, helping them make the best decisions and conduct their RDM plans correctly and efficiently.

Mariette then asked the big question, what is the actual goal of research data management itself? Her answer:

“My future self (or another researcher) can find, assess, understand and reuse my research data with a minimum of time and effort.”

She made it clear that her main aim was not to focus on open data sharing – even though she supports it – but more on best practice in research data management. At this point, Mariette works with a broad spectrum of researchers with different wants and needs, and she doesn’t want to alienate those who work with sensitive or confidential data.

Mariette closed her presentation with a few remarks on how she believes researchers will get on board with a research data management program. Firstly, she says, don’t enforce an RDM plan – show researchers what’s in it for them. Secondly, value all data – open or not, and finally, be realistic about your goals – opening up all data is not possible; allowing access to existing metadata so we know what is out there is a far more reasonable proposition.

The webinar ended with a lively Q&A debate spearheaded by Dan Valen; great questions invoked great responses! Using #DSwebinar, our audience was able to interact with our panel throwing their opinions into the mix. A few of the tweets have been included above, but if you feel you still have something to say – we’re all ears! Tweet us @digitalsci using #DSwebinar.

Thanks again everyone for making this happen!

VIEW WEBINAR PRESENTATION SLIDES

Note: We were excited to find out that Kristin Briney recently wrote a piece on her personal blog titled ‘Open Data’s Dirty Little Secret‘. It refers to a few of her thoughtful insights that she shared with us on Tuesday.

webinar panel photo