Oxford research data blog

Since the Research Data Alliance began in 2012 it has rapidly grown to become the forum for discussing and coordinating efforts to improve research data management practices between organisations and academic disciplines at the international scale. Whereas the International Digital Curation Conference provides the traditional forum for those working in the field of research data management to introduce new developments, tools, and ideas, the RDA Plenaries consist of a series of workshops by Interest Groups which may then spawn Working Groups of volunteers who are tasked with implementing specific projects. This format is obviously particularly well-suited to encouraging international collaboration and the development of generally-accepted standards. The success of the RDA is attested by the rapid growth of attendance at the plenary meetings: over 500 people attended the 4^th Plenary in Amsterdam.

This was the first RDA plenary meeting that I had attended, and many others were new to the RDA too. Two of the disadvantages of the rapid growth and sheer scale of the event was that some delegates were inevitably not up to speed with many of the issues up for discussion, and that ten or so parallel sessions going on at any one time. This made it hard to know what to attend and whether discussions would be building on prior work or effectively starting again from scratch. The quality of the workshops thus varied depending on the convenors and delegates that attended. A session on data management planning seemed to be curiously unaware of the tools already developed by the Digital Curation Centre, and a workshop about sustainability was slowed by delegates posing the same big questions that delegates to this sort of event have been posing for the last four years. But despite these inevitable frustrations, there was much of interest.

The conference began with EU assurances of concern and of money. Robert Jan Smits (Director-General of Research and Innovation for the European Commission) indicated that the reproducibility of research is at present only 10% to 30% and it was clear that scientists needed to start treating their data with the same care as their publications if this situation were to be improved. A video presentation by Neelie Kroes (departing Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe) was followed by Professor Barend Mons’s keynote considering ‘FAIR’ (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data and other issues du jour.

The keynote was perhaps not as controversial as billed, although it did raise some points of contention that were returned to throughout the conference. Firstly, Mons chose to advocate the term ‘data stewardship’ over ‘data management’, although to my mind the latter is necessary (and involves the researcher or creator of the data) for the former to be possible (where some sort of specialist custodian assumes responsibility); secondly, he took the approach that the research paper should be considered supplementary to the data rather than vice versa; thirdly, he placed a major emphasis on the machine readability of data, in particular the encoding of every single scientific assertion as an RDF triplet with provenance and licence information. This may have been informed by Mons’s background in bioinformatics. To me, coming from a background in the humanities, it sounded utopian. On a more pragmatic note, Mons added that he thought 5% of total research funding should go to data stewardship.

Keynote over, the assembled throng dispersed to the many parallel working groups, interest groups, and birds of a feather sessions. I opted for interest groups on service management, sustainability, and active data management plans. Of these, the first was the most interesting, despite including rather a large element of sales pitch. There has been little discussion so far amongst the research data management community about how to actually run services, partly because most of the effort has been focussed on establishing what services are needed rather than how to run them. The conveners emphasised the importance of having a service management system in place before a service becomes well established, although the pitch was aimed more at services being offered by research groups than by institutional service departments such as IT Services or Libraries, where solid service management practices are (or should be) already in place. Whilst the session was informative, I couldn’t help but feel that in most cases research groups might be better advised to speak to their IT Services about setting up supported services rather than simply doing it themselves only to find they lacked the time or reward structures to manage and maintain them. On a related note, the Sustainability Interest Group, which was concerned mostly with software and eResearch infrastructure, exposed a significant gap in understanding and expectations regarding the provision of tools developed at the research group level and institutionally-supported tools and services – a gap that IT Services departments should perhaps be trying to close by getting more closely involved with researchers.

Tuesday’s keynote by Christine Borgman (UCLA) began by taking issue with Barend Mons’s keynote the day before, insisting that ‘publications are not simply containers for data’ but rather arguments that are supported by data. Furthermore, she stressed the nature of data as compound objects with frequently uncertain ownership, and criticized metadata models as frequently being too ‘heavyweight’ for individual researchers to use. Approaching research data management from a librarian’s perspective, she criticised popular online tools such as FigShare for their short-term business models and lack of sustainability. Her talk underscored some of the differences in attitudes and approaches towards data management and curation in different disciplines, stating memorably that in the humanities many researchers regard their data almost as a ‘dowry’ that they can bring to a new institution when they move. I should state that in practice I’ve spoken to few researchers who think of their data in quite such terms.

The Interest Group on the legal interoperability of research data proved more interesting than I thought it might do. The issue of ensuring that data can be combined and reused across various jurisdictions is very important given the international nature of much research these days, but it’s not a subject I’d heard addressed before. This practical-minded interest group had already been working on a set of principles to govern interoperability, which were discussed in some detail. The emphasis of the work was on intellectual property rather than licences, as licences are (it seems) essentially copyright enforceable rather than contractual agreements (as least in the U.S.). I may not have followed all of the legal niceties in the discussion, but I shall certainly follow the outcomes of the 1-day workshop that select members of the group will stage in Washington DC on the 21^st October.

Before attending the RDA Plenary, I had only really been actively following the discussions of the Long-tail of Data Interest Group. Their double session consisted of case studies and discussion of practical steps to help the international research data management community. Lots of recommendations for researchers and institutions arose from the case studies, including: training students in data sharing; data CVs and impact portfolios; integrated research data management one-stop-shops (which Oxford already has to some extent); supporting platforms for sharing failed experiments; providing data visualisation tools and platforms; integrating data management tools into researchers day-to-day workflows; providing free data storage (up to a point); providing institutional data management plan templates; advertising the existence of data that’s already being shared; establishing academic community data-sharing interest groups; filming and sharing data ‘success stories’; ensuring links between papers and data are made and maintained; and league tables of data deposits by academic departments within institutions, to encourage an element of competition. Suggestions for collective ‘working group’ projects to assist the community included developing plug-ins for popular software already used by researchers in order to facilitate data sharing, and easy deposit to data archives and improving awareness of the tools and services that already exist. I seem to have volunteered myself to collate information about existing tools and share them more broadly with the Interest Group, which I shall try to make a start on over the next few months.

On the final morning of the conference I attended the science stream workshop on knowledge networks, which was interesting albeit rather too theoretical for my taste. The presentations and conversations focussed on the possibility of creating a new sort of science gateway which would maximise utility for researchers by balancing the scope of search engines such as Google with the relevance of specialist disciplinary gateways. It will be good if it works.

The final plenary session consisted of a panel discussion featuring the great and good of various nations to emphasize the need for international action and collaboration to address the challenges of research data management. A brief but lively discussion about the extent to which researchers should share resources with the private sector ensued, but did not lead anywhere in particular. With a blast of the Beach Boys and a video extolling the delights of San Diego, the conference closed with the message that the next RDA would be held in California in March 2015. All things considered, attending the conference was well worth while, although in future it might be useful to provide a little more information about what each parallel session will cover in order to help direct delegates to the most relevant sessions.

Over the coming term we will once again be running the ‘Things to do with Data’ series of lunchtime talks at IT Services on Banbury Road. Taking place every Wednesday from weeks 2 to 6 at 12:30, these talks will feature a variety of researchers and support staff from Oxford and beyond presenting examples and ideas of what you can do to get more from your research data.

Beginning with a general introduction to the art of research data management, over the term we’ll be hearing about a new database management service, ideas for analyzing interview texts, data visualization techniques, biomedical research databases, and data ownership and intellectual property rights. The full programme is available from http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/acit-rs-team/events/rdmcourses/datatalks/ and will shortly be added to the ITLP’s programme of training and events (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/).

Do come along and be inspired!

IT Services are developing a new way of providing central web publishing services, which will cater for individual members of the University wanting to manage their own web presence in addition to clubs, societies, research groups, and other units.

The new service will replace the existing web publishing service hosted at users.ox.ac.uk and will offer substantially more features, including a range of templates for different types of website, plus optional modules and bespoke services.

At this stage IT Services are scoping which functions should be included in the standard service.

To take the survey, please go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WebCMSaaS.

During Trinity Term 2014, I organized a series of talks with the help of the IT Learning Programme called ‘Things to do with Data‘. The series looked at a number of tools, techniques, and tips for managing research data. I’m please to be able to announce that after rather a long delay during which we mostly wrestled with a new prototype lecture-capture software package, we now have online all of the slides and recordings of the talks that we are ever likely to get. Please do take a look at them at the ‘Things to do with Data’ webpage: http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/acit-rs-team/events/rdmcourses/datatalks2013trinity/.

We’ve now also got the go-ahead for another series of these talks in Michaelmas Term. I’ll post details on this blog once all our speakers are confirmed, but in the mean time make a date in your diary to come along to IT Services on Banbury Road at 12:30 every Wednesday from weeks 2 to 7.

The Research Data Oxford site has a handy summary of the key parts of funder data policies to help you understand what is required of you for an application for funding, during your research project, and beyond. These summaries can be found at http://researchdata.ox.ac.uk/funder-requirements/ and now additionally includes information on the Department for International Development’s (DFID) research and enhanced open access policy.

An overview at a glance of funders’ data policies can also be found on the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) website: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/policy-and-legal/overview-funders-data-policies.

If you have need of further advice you can always contact the RDM enquiries team: researchdata@ox.ac.uk.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the ‘Online Research Database Service’ (ORDS). The ORDS is a free, centrally-supported, online service where researchers can create, edit, search and share their research data. The service is open to all research staff and postgraduate research students at the University of Oxford, plus their collaborators. Users can upload existing databases and spreadsheets into the ORDS, or create new databases from scratch. Different project members can be assigned different levels of permission, to ensure that only those people who ought to be able to edit the data can do so, whilst others can see and query the data that is already there. Data can be exported from the ORDS into almost all popular data analysis software. The ORDS comes with its own online viewing, editing, and querying interfaces, but the data in ORDS can also be accessed via custom-built websites or popular database management software.

The ORDS was developed by staff at University of Oxford IT Services and all data in the service is hosted within the University. If you are looking for a straightforward and secure platform on which to develop and share a research database, go to http://ords.ox.ac.uk for more information about the service and instructions on how to register.

The ORDS will be offered initially as mediated service. Any University of Oxford researcher can register and try out a limited version of the ORDS, but you will need to get in touch with the service team before accessing the full service. This is to ensure that the ORDS can indeed meet your research requirements and to get a sense of how it will be used.

The ORDS is likely to be of interest to you if:

• You are building a database of research information, especially if you are doing so as part of a team
• You want to share an existing database with colleagues or the wider research community
• You would like to developed a database in a free and non-proprietary format
• You would like to be able to publish subsets of a database that underpin research articles
• You want somewhere to host a database that can be used as the back-end to a research website

The ORDS is not intended for:

• ‘big data’ databases, of over 10 GB or so
• Highly sensitive non-anonymized data

We will seek to develop the ORDS to cater for users with such data in future and continue to improve the service in response to user feedback.

Exemplar data sharing agreements are now available from Research Services. These will help any researcher or project adminstrator develop suitable legal agreements to share their data or access data from third parties. A full explanation may be found under Rights and Licensing / Licensing your Data.

Creators and and managers of large-scale surveys now have a compact guide to help them make their data more widely used by researchers following deposit at the UK Data Archive.

‘Depositing shareable survey data’ was developed by a specialist team at the UK Data Service with extensive input from UK government departments, academic survey owners and survey producers.

The 16-page handbook takes the reader through the full data journey, from fieldwork planning to post-project user access. Content is organised into five stages: Plan, Prepare, Negotiate, Deposit and Ingest. While the guide was specifically developed to support depositors of large-scale surveys at the UKDA and its dissemination by the UKDS, it also works as a useful tool for research data management generally.

Further information has been added to the section ‘Working with data – Data management tools’.

http://researchdata.ox.ac.uk/home/managing-your-data-at-oxford/data-management-planning/

Then select the tab for ‘Subject-specific guidance’.

During Trinity term we are running a series of talks relating to research data management entitled ‘Things to do with Data’.

Your research involves collecting data – maybe from experiments, or surveys, or information plucked from ancient texts – but what do you do with it? How do you organize it, analyse it, visualize it, share it with colleagues, ensure that it’s kept safe, preserve it so that others may find and use it in future, perhaps in ways that you never imagined when you first collected it? These are the issues we’ll be looking at over Trinity Term 2014 in the new ‘Things to do with data’ series of lunchtime talks.

This series looks at some of the interesting things that researchers do with their data to unlock its potential and realize its value. Covering aspects of data management from planning to re-use, these talks are intended to inspire whilst also considering the practical requirements of research funders and the issues surrounding data sharing.

Please note that this series of talks is aimed at research staff and postgraduate researchers.

The programme is as follows:

30th April – Hub : live data management in lab-based research (David Wallom, OeRC)

14th May – How to do something with data in the ARC (Andy Richards, Advanced Research Computing, IT Services)

21st May – Securing documents and data in the cloud (Tom Ansty, Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine)

28th May – Resources for research data managers (Meriel Patrick, IT Services)

4th June – Citing and archiving  your research data using ORA-Data (Sally Rumsey, Bodleian Libraries)

11th June – Create and publish reusable data in the life sciences (Susanna-Assunta Sansone, OeRC)

25th June – Accessing biological information in research (Stephen Taylor, Computational Biology Research Group)

The talks will be hosted by the Research Support team and the IT Learning Programme, and will be held at IT Services in the 13 Banbury Road building.

All talks begin at 12:30 and conclude at 1:30.

We hope to see lots of you there!