- Home
- About
- What do I need to do now?
- University of Oxford Policy
- Funder requirements
- Frequently asked questions
- Glossary
- Working with data
- Preservation
- Sharing
- Tools, services, & training
- Blog
- Contact
Following on from the publication of guidance created specifically for Oxford researchers for users of the data management planning tool DMP Online, we’re now pleased to offer a couple of complementary new resources.
DMP Online offers users the ability to sign in to the service using their Oxford Single Sign-On username and password (the same ones you use to access University email, library resources, etc.). However, for this to work, it’s first necessary to link your DMP Online account and your Oxford credentials. This is a quick and easy process, and instructions and a one-minute video walkthrough are now available from the DMP Online entry in the RDO site’s Tools, Services, and Training catalogue.
The Research Data Oxford team is delighted to announce that the Oxford Research Archive for Data (ORA-Data) has been awarded the Data Seal of Approval. The Seal represents an international, peer-reviewed standard which certifies a data archive according to sixteen essential criteria for good practice. This provides evidence of a combination of appropriate security, access and preservation mechanisms that benefits both depositors and data users. As a result the archive has been given the status of a Trusted Digital Repository. ORA-Data was launched in May 2015 as a response to growing demand for an institutional data repository and forms part of the wider Oxford Research Archive.
You can find out more about its place as part of effective data management here: http://researchdata.ox.ac.uk/preserving-your-data/archives-and-other-options/
In addition visit the main website here: http://ora.ox.ac.uk/
We’re pleased to announce that users of DMP Online can now benefit from guidance created specifically for University of Oxford researchers.
DMP Online is a free web-based service from the Digital Curation Centre which allows researchers to create a data management plan for their research project. Templates from a range of major UK funders are available (suitable for creating the data management plans often now required as part of grant applications), plus a generic template for general use.
Guidance on completing each section of the plan is also provided. Users have previously been able to view guidance from the appropriate funding body and/or the DCC, but anyone creating a plan and specifying the University of Oxford as their institution will now also see a third set of guidance. In addition to providing general good practice advice, the Oxford guidance points researchers at Oxford services and information sources that may be of use.
To create a data management plan using DMP Online, visit the website and click Sign Up. Complete your details as requested (if you choose, you can then link your profile to your institutional credentials, allowing you to log in using your Oxford SSO username and password). Then click Create Plan to choose a template, and select the guidance that you’d like to see.
Further advice on research data management planning is available from the RDO Data Management Planning page. Researchers can also contact the RDM enquiries team or the IT Services Research Support team. A regular Research Data Management Planning course (which makes use of DMP Online) is offered via the IT Learning Programme.
Here’s an update on some of the things that we’re working on that you can look forward to over the coming year…
DMPonline is a widely used service to help researchers complete data management plans. It already provides templates matching the various funder guidelines and contextual guidance, and we will shortly be adding an Oxford-specific overlay. This will provide additional hints and tips on how to complete the various sections of a data management plan and reference the services and infrastructure available to members of the University.
The Bodleian Libraries are working towards an institutional ‘dark’ archive for university and college records and highly-sensitive research data for which the existing ORA-Data service is not appropriate. This will be a certified service meeting stringent security criteria.
We are aware that innovative and informative ways of presenting data can increase the impact that research data can have, both in terms of enabling researchers to gain insights they might otherwise miss, and in terms of the effect on public understanding. IT Services are working on methods to facilitate novel data analysis and high-quality visualizations.
This longstanding intention has been put on-hold whilst the Bodleian conduct a review of the technologies they are using, but should be back on the table in early 2016. Whilst it may not literally be a one-click process (users will inevitably have to sign up to repository terms and conditions), this should make the process of getting research data from live services into an archive much simpler, and reduce the amount of descriptive metadata that researchers need to add by hand.
We are currently in the process of scoping requirements for a ‘Participant Data Project’ (see http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/acit-rs-team/advice/research-data-management/participant-data-project/). This work is already ensuring that the IT Services Research Support Team have a better understanding of the workflows and technologies used by researchers in the Medical and Social Sciences, and will enable improved support in future. If opportunities are identified to automate common processes then these will be pursued.
Whist we are constantly updating the content on the RDO website to ensure it remains current and useful, we are now looking at ways in which we can expand its coverage to offer advice on some of the things that researchers can do with their data. This will include enabling better reproducibility, increased impact, and more innovative analysis.
One of the challenges we’ve faced in supporting researchers with their data management has been that there are very different practices and cultures in different academic disciplines. Understandably, people would like examples of what the various funder requirements really mean to them in practice. We will therefore be working with academics across various disciplines to produce examples and case studies of good practice to try to make the abstract a little more concrete. If you would like to be involved in creating a discipline-specific case study, let us know by writing to researchdata@ox.ac.uk.
There are planned improvements to the ORDS and ORA-Data, work to better integrate Symplectic with the other parts of the RDM infrastructure is likely, and the market review that the Bodleian is undertaking is likely to lead to yet further ideas for improvements.
If you have any concerns you would like to raise, or ideas for improved research data management support at Oxford, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch with us at researchdata@ox.ac.uk.
A new version of the postcard advertising the Research Data Oxford site is now available. (Click the images to view a larger version.)
A second postcard, advertising the Research Data Health Check service for researchers, is also available.
To request copies of either of these, please email researchdata@ox.ac.uk.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 6th Research Data Alliance Plenary meeting in Paris. With over 600 delegates, the RDA plenary events have turned into the largest regular gatherings of the international research data management crowd that there is. Consisting of various Interest Groups and Working Groups dedicated to particular aspects of research data, the RDA has become the de facto body for establishing common policies, approaches, and standards.
This autumn, the focus of the conference was on research data for climate change, and a special effort was made to engage with the business sector and small start-ups. This included an interesting ‘minute-madness’ session in which thirty or so young entrepreneurs gave a pitch for their enterprises, explaining how they were gathering and/or using big data as a central plank of their business models. If the chosen enterprises were representative then It seems that the world will soon be awash with electrical appliance metering apps, data visualization tools, and computer-heated water. The winner was an app called ‘Plume’, which measures and reports air pollution levels in various cities around the world – perfect if you want to avoid going for a jog at the worst times of the day, although personally I try to play it safe by not going jogging at all. I was rather taken by a ‘hyperlocal’ weather app called Wezzoo Oombrella (the Web is clearly running out of unclaimed words), which would have been useful to have known about when dodging the rain last Tuesday.
Elsewhere the assembled special interest groups were continuing to pursue more academic concerns. Being a member of the Interest Group for the ‘Long Tail of Research Data’ I was particularly pleased to hear the results announced of our recent survey into the different research data management tools and software that researchers (and others) are using. Whilst the expected tools were all frequently cited (Excel, R, SPSS, MatLab, etc.), the survey also exposed some less well-known analysis software and subject-specific tools. We haven’t officially published the results yet, but I’ll link to them once they’re generally available. The downside to surveys like this is that I now have several days’ work ahead of me trying to learn more about what all these tools really do and considering whether they offer any scope to improve practices across academic disciplines.
Of particular interest amongst the sessions I attended were those relating to my obligatory new interest in sensitive data (see my post about the new Participant Data Project). Having attended the UK Data Service’s very informative ‘5 Safes of Secure Access to Confidential Data’ just the previous week, I feel as though I’m getting a pretty intensive crash-course in the finer points of data anonymization and secure sharing. Both the session on International Access to Sensitive Data and that on the Life Sciences on Sensitive Data were very informative and engaging in good work. The Big Health Data IG is still taking shape, but looks as though it will play an important role in the future. Finally, the IG on Reproducibility, whilst somewhat neglected by those RDA members that had frequented it in earlier plenaries, offered a good forum for sharing ideas regarding software and good practice in a field that I suspect will become much more important over the next few years as researchers get the hang of depositing data and the attention moves more towards what people can actually do with it.
We’ve just commenced a new project to investigate ways of improving research data management for researchers working with human participants. The scope includes research both in the medical sciences and the social sciences. The initial scoping phase of this project will last until the end of 2015 and involve interviewing researchers, clinicians, administrators, security experts, and service providers to better understand the issues faced when conducting this type of research and identify potential solutions to common problems. We anticipate that this will be followed by a second phase during which we will produce improved guidance and support for researchers, and potentially implement improvements to infrastructure and services.
More information about the project is available from the project webpage at http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/acit-rs-team/advice/research-data-management/participant-data-project/.
If you have suggestions as to how we could help improve any aspect of the research workflow, we’d love to hear from you. Tell us about the problems you confront in your own research via researchdata@ox.ac.uk.
Although it’s been a while now since the new EPSRC Expectations regarding data kicked in, I realize that I never got around to reporting on this blog how our project alerting our principal investigators to the changes went, so here it is…
The ESPRC Readiness Project was undertaken to raise awareness amongst EPSRC-funded researchers of the new research data management Expectations that the Engineering and Physical Sciences Funding Council introduced on the 1st May 2015 (https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/expectations/). The nine Expectations oblige researchers to document, preserve, and provide access to the research data that they create, and require research institutions to provide the services and support needed to ensure this can happen. Rather than simply asking researchers to comply with the new Expectations, the project sought to understand researchers’ concerns, and to improve the guidance and support offered by the University of Oxford.
More than a hundred EPSRC grant-holders were sent a letter signed by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research (Professor Ian Walmsley) informing them of the new Expectations and inviting them to meet with a member of the EPRSC Readiness Project Team. Over the coming months, the large majority of those invited participated either in a one-to-one meeting or a disciplinary workshop.
Reactions to the EPSRC Expectations expressed during the interview and group sessions were mixed, but generally negative. Many researchers felt that the Expectations would add to their already busy workloads and be of little value either to themselves or their wider disciplinary communities. Even when informed of the kinds of benefits the EPSRC envisaged arising from the Expectations, a degree of scepticism remained. The Expectations were, however, greeted more positively by researchers working in the fields of crystallography and aspects of biochemistry, where it is already common practice to share data and where the infrastructure to assist with this is already established at the disciplinary level. It will inevitably take time for all of the new data management requirements to become generally accepted practice in many disciplines, but responses also suggested that barriers to acceptance can be greatly lowered by the provision of simple, integrated, and easy-to-use tools and services by the institution.
Throughout the project, researchers sought clarification as to how the EPSRC Expectations would affect them in practice and what they needed to do to ensure compliance. These questions were addressed and added to a FAQ on Oxford’s Research Data website (http://researchdata.ox.ac.uk/epsrc-data-requirements-and-what-you-need-to-do/). A checklist and decision tree where also developed.
Particular concerns included: what actually counts as data?; what should be done with the software underpinning datasets?; whether preference should be given to preserving raw or processed data; whether the effort required to intelligently share research data was worth it for some data types; and how the expectations applied to largely theoretical research outputs. The concerns raised by researchers have been relayed to the EPSRC.
A number of suggestions as to how University support could be improved were noted down and are now being acted upon. These have proved particularly important for understanding how researchers need to interact with the University’s data repository, ORA-Data (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bdlss/digital-services/data-archiving). As a result of the project, the data deposit workflow has been significantly improved, and the pricing model for the service is being reviewed.
EPSRC-sponsored researchers are now leading the field in terms of the number of data deposits they are making to the ORA-Data repository, suggesting that the project has indeed been successful in conveying the Expectations.
With the new EPSRC expectations coming into effect today, 1st May 2015, we have put together a simple compliance checklist for EPSRC-funded researchers at the University of Oxford. This lists the three essential steps that you need to take to ensure your future articles are compliant, and the two conditional elements of which you need to be aware. Take a look at it at http://researchdata.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/126/2014/03/EPSRC-Research-Data-Self-Assesment-Checklist.pdf.
We’ve also been talking to a number of researchers in the MPLS division about their concerns regarding the EPSRC Expectations, and have been trying to address the questions we’re hearing via the EPSRC FAQ page at http://researchdata.ox.ac.uk/epsrc-data-requirements-and-what-you-need-to-do/. If you have questions about the Expectations that are not addressed here, please write to researchdata@ox.ac.uk, and one of our support team will be happy to help out.
