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It’s not always easy for everyone who would like to attend a talk to be physically present, especially in a geographically dispersed university such as Oxford. To help speakers at the ‘Things to do with Data’ series of Wednesday lunchtime talks reach a wider audience, we have therefore decided to stream their presentations (slides and audio) live to members of the University.
You will now find links from the Things to do with Data webpage to a URL where you can view the talks live as they take place. You won’t be able to ask the speaker questions via this medium, but it’s the next best thing to being in the room.
Furthermore, we will continue to make the presentations accessible online after the talks. You can already watch the recording of this term’s first talk – Martin Wynne speaking about the CLARIN Project – via the website.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the final workshop of the RECODE project in sunny Athens. The RECODE Project (Policy RECommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe) is an EU-funded project that has been working towards a number of policy recommendations for various parties with a role in enabling the re-use of research data. Although their detailed report is unlikely to be published until February 2015, they have published a summary booklet which succinctly covers the main recommendations. The recommendations are high-level and largely uncontroversial, although not necessarily straightforward to implement – most will occupy the sector for years to come and involve elements of culture change. Whilst hardly a revelation, the need to provide incentives for researchers to share their data openly was referred to frequently during the workshop.
I had been invited to the workshop to describe the work going on at Oxford as an example of good practice at the institutional level, although anyone following my presentation would quickly have realized that much of our ‘good practice’ remains at the theoretical rather than the practical level, despite recent progress. I was struck by how many of the invited speakers were from the UK, which perhaps emphasizes the advances the UK HE sector has made over the last five years or so – particularly in response to the demands of the research funders and facilitated by the Digital Curation Centre and JISC MRD Programme.
Of the six recommendations for research institutions, Oxford is in the process of implementing four. We already have a policy, although it does not specifically refer to ‘Open Access’ to data – our researchers are still adapting to Open Access to publications and could do without the further confusion at this point in time. Nor are we (yet) attempting to ‘include open access to high quality research data as a formal criterion for career progression’. This is clearly a potentially fraught area, and it would seem sensible to get helpful data-sharing infrastructure in place first that researchers wish to use willingly, before considering any far-reaching changes to academic career structures.
The presentations from the workshop should be available shortly from http://recodeproject.eu/events/recode-workshops/.
A happy new year to you all from Oxford’s Research Data Management support team!
To celebrate the start of 2015, we’ve finally made the recordings of last term’s ‘Things to do with Data’ talks available online. You can find them at http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/acit-rs-team/advice/rdmcourses/datatalks2014michaelmas/. Talks include…
Unfortunately we failed to capture the audio track for the last presentation, but the slides are very informative in their own right.
Information about this term’s Things to do with Data talks is online at https://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/acit-rs-team/advice/rdmcourses/datatalks/.
It’s been a busy few months for the team behind the Online Research Database Service (ORDS).
The ORDS is a free, centrally supported service which allows researchers to create, edit, search and share relational databases. Since the official launch in August, we’ve been beavering away to support and enhance the service.
This week, the release of version 1.0.6 of the software brought a number of improvements: first and foremost, there has been a major overhaul of the way the database schema designer works, resolving difficulties with saving changes that some users have experienced recently. Eagle eyed users will spot that the advanced query page is also looking rather different, with the aim of making it easier to use. Details of all the additions and bug fixes can be found on the ORDS blog.
There has also been a flurry of activity on non-technical fronts – for example, the first ORDS training course happened earlier this term. This will be repeated at regular intervals: further details can be found in the IT Learning Programme’s course listing. To ensure a finger is kept on the pulse of the user community, an ORDS User Group is also in the process of being established.
The ORDS is open to all research staff and postgraduate research students at the University of Oxford, plus their collaborators. For more details, or to register to use the service, visit the ORDS website.
If you are planning on putting together a bid for research funding over the coming months, you may wish to consider attending the Data Curation Centre’s half-day Data Management Planning workshop on the 29th January. Full announcement below…
DCC workshop: Introduction to Data Management Planning and DMPonline – 29 January 2015, Central London
Funding bodies increasingly require evidence of appropriate provisions for data management and curation in new grant funding applications. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is delighted to announce we will host a half-day workshop to provide an introduction to data management planning and DMPonline, the DCC’s web-based tool to help researchers write DMPs. We’ve recently released a new version of DMPonline which offers a lot of flexibility in terms of how institutions can customise it. You can create your own template(s), provide example/suggested answers and add tailored guidance to help researchers respond to requirements. We will demonstrate DMPonline, profile the options available for customising the tool and undertake a practical exercise on data management planning.
By the end of this workshop participants will:
This is a half-day workshop running from 1pm – 4pm.
Cost: £65, including lunch
Location: The Wesley, 81-103 Euston Street, London, NW1 2EZ
To register, please go to http://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&deptid=80&catid=96&prodid=1758
Places are limited so be sure to book early. More information can be found on our website.
Kind regards,
Joy Davidson,
Associate Director,
Digital Curation Centre (DCC)
The theme of the Digital Curation Centre’s 12th Research Data Management Forum was ‘Linking Data and Repositories’, although in practice speakers covered a wide range of topics from convincing researchers of the value of data preservation and curation to the new JISC investments. One of the good things about the RDMF workshops is the way that certain topical issues being confronted by several organizations at that moment tend to bubble to the top of conversation. Having left for the workshop immediately after one of the Oxford Research Data Management Working Group meetings I was pleasantly surprised that one of the issues that raised its head at that meeting was also confronted at the RDMF: the question of exactly what data researchers should be preserving.
Confronted with increasingly stringent funder requirements relating to research data management, one of the responses we’re hearing from researchers is ‘but what data do I actually need to preserve’? Given that good research data management can take time, people are understandably nervous of expectations that seem to imply they must document and deposit absolutely all of the information they are collecting or generating. The University Policy does offer a bit of clarity in this regard: “Research data and records are defined as the recorded information (regardless of the form or the media in which they may exist) necessary to support or validate a research project’s observations, findings or outputs”. This may be helpful in narrowing the scope of what needs to be curated. The implication is, for instance, that in most cases there is no need to preserve ‘raw’ data when it is the more refined, processed data that directly underpins research outputs (although it would clearly be important to explain how the processed data has been derived). The policy does, nevertheless, leave something to the judgement of the researcher(s) responsible for the data. This is in part deliberate, as it is extremely hard to provide a single simple definition that is clear and unambiguous across all academic disciplines. And definitions of ‘data’ can vary widely.
Questions of data selection or ‘triage’ are not new to the RDM community, but whereas previously they tended to be relegated in favour of topics of greater immediacy to institutions, it seems that this is now an issue whose time has come.
One of the striking outcomes of RDMF12 was that it seems that universities in the UK are now all heading towards the same essential set of components to provide data management infrastructure. From university after university delegates heard tell of a slightly different combination of repository and related technologies, but all leading towards integrated systems intended to do the same basic things. The unsolved issues were much more around engaging researchers and encouraging engagement with these infrastructures.
Jonathan Tedds (University of Leicester) got the workshop going in the first session with his turn as a (only partially acted) truculent scientist, lamenting the pointlessness of the extra bureaucracy and management interference that ‘research data management’ involved. It effectively brought home to the audience the many not-entirely-unreasonable objections that researchers have to new funder requirements, several of which concerned the matter of what counted as ‘research data’ and whether preserving certain data really had any value.
Over the past few years there has been much, often tedious, talk about ‘carrots and sticks’, and which approach is best in terms of encouraging compliance (the very word ‘compliance’ can have a curious effect on some). Conversations at RDMF12 steered very much towards engaging with and encouraging researchers to see the benefits of data curation, and working together to understand and define what data would actually have value beyond the immediate project. Simon Hodson’s conclusion emphasized the need to select data sensibly when putting policies into practice and avoid the prospect of infuriating researchers whilst generating ‘digital landfill’. This is something we’ll now be following up at Oxford as we come up with clearer guidelines and support as to what data should actually be preserved by researchers in various disciplines and why.
Last week’s ‘Directions for the Research Data Management in UK Universities’ workshop afforded me the chance to visit our friends in the fens and engage in the debate regarding ‘what happens next’ with RDM. The workshop gathered about 40 people together, mostly representing UK universities but also representing some national bodies, such as Jisc, RIN, RLUK, Rugit, UCISA, and SCONUL. The workshop was particularly welcome in that it represented the re-engagement of Jisc with the world of research data management after a prolonged chrysaline hiatus during which they were reorganizing and refocusing (Jisc is no longer the acronym of the ‘Joint information Systems Committee’, it is now just ‘Jisc’). Jisc funded several projects that helped us develop RDM infrastructure at Oxford during 2009-2013, as well as providing national coordination.
The workshop began with a summary of the progress UK universities have been making to provide their researchers with data management services and enable compliance with funder requirements. Rachel Bruce presented the findings of the DCC’s survey of (mostly) Russell Group universities, whilst presentations from the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester brought delegates up to speed with developments at two of the UK’s front runners in this field. Both already provide research groups with central data storage facilities – 0.5 TB at Edinburgh, and a very generous 20TB at Manchester. We have a project underway to Oxford to provide something similar, but at present it is mostly down to departments to provide data space, with our NSMS team providing servers and private cloud. Both Edinburgh and Manchester have institutional data repositories in place, although Oxford is not far behind on this front, with our own ORA-Data service due to launch as a pilot on the 1st December 2014. Particularly impressive was the researcher information dashboard that Manchester are offering to Principal Investigators to track their research information. Again, there are plans afoot for something similar at Oxford, and we’ll be looking at how others are approaching this.
The day also featured talks about research data typologies, which we may well look further at for our own support staff development, and presentations by researchers about their own data management torments, and what would actually help them avoid data loss and share their data more easily with colleagues.
The main aim of the workshop was to consider what should happen next, particularly at the national level, which would enable universities to improve their RDM practices. The answer to this seemed to be ‘everything’, although that may prove impractical. More pragmatic suggestions that I picked out included:
How JISC and other national organizations will take these and other suggestions forward is now for them to decide and prioritize, but it is encouraging that there seems again to be efforts afoot to provide community coordination and guidance for UK Universities in this field.
The ‘Things to do with Data’ lunchtime talk originally scheduled for the 12th November has had to be pushed back to the 3rd December. Jonathan Tedds (University of Leicester) will be speaking about the BRISSkit suite of integrated open-source software for managing biomedical data and how to share data via open data journals. We hope that the change of date will not inconvenience anyone. You can sign up for the talk, which will take place between 12:30 and 1:30 in the Evenlode Room in the IT Services building at 13 Banbury Road, via the ITLP course booking pages.
This afternoon I had the pleasure of trip to London to join colleagues from the Digital Curation Centre, the BBC, and various academic institutions to road test a recently-launched tool for comparing the costs of data curation. Built as part of the EU-funded ‘4C’ Project (collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation’, the ‘Curation Costs Exchange’, or ‘CCEx’ as it is abbreviated, enables institutions to input information about their data curation costs in order to compare them against those of similar institutions. The idea is that such transparency aids institutions in keeping costs down, helps budget for future services, and encourages collaboration and sharing. The website also explains the cost components of curation, provides a discussion forum, and a quick guide to curation services offered elsewhere.
First impressions were very positive – the website has a slick, well-designed interface, but I was not entirely certain exactly what was being costed. Coming from a service-development background, my assumption was that the tool would help me get an idea of the costs of implementing curation services in general, but after a bit of poking about and clicking on things it became clear that the scope of the tool is actually very specifically focused on data ingest and preservation. The user indicates how much data they have, and in what formats, then inputs how much the various elements of the process cost in terms of staff time, hardware, software, overheads, etc. and then gets to compare these costs with other similar institutions. This it does very well, with nice graphical representations of one’s own costs in comparison with broader averages. I can see this being a useful tool for institutional repository managers (see the forthcoming ORA Data) wanting to check that they’re not spending over the odds on the services they provide.
There are some aspects in which the CCEx could be improved, as we discussed during the workshop. At present, one can indicate how many copies of each dataset are being preserved, but not whether they are being preserved on tape or spinning disk (which has an impact on storage and retrieval costs), nor is it easy at present to distinguish between high-curation models (where librarians or archivists check and edit the descriptive metadata upon data submission), or low-curation models, where data and metadata are accepted ‘as is’. Obviously a repository employing the former model will have higher costs than those adopting the latter, but this is also likely to be reflected in future in the levels of data re-use. There were also questions about the extent to which researchers would need to be involved in the process to indicate the pre-ingest costs of the data management of any given data deposit in order to avoid costs simply being pushed from one part of the institution to another. As we discovered during a survey of research database costs at Oxford back in 2011, researchers are not used to trying to capture such costs, many of which are covered by departments or concealed in general overheads.
Whilst the CCEx will be able to make more accurate comparisons between institutions once these issues are better addressed, it is already looking like a useful tools that will help drive down data repository costs over the long term.will be able to make more accurate comparisons between institutions once these issues are better addressed, it is already looking like a useful tools that will help drive down data repository costs over the long term.
