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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:
The ORDS is not intended for:
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!
We are excited to announce the launch of the Research Data Management Mentoring Programme.
We are currently seeking a group of around six social science research projects to participate in this new initiative, coordinated by members of the IT Services Research Support Team and the Bodleian Data Librarian.
Anyone reading this blog probably already knows that the way that research data is handled, cared for, and preserved has become an increasingly high profile issue in academic circles in recent years. In 2012, the University of Oxford adopted a formal Policy on the Management of Research Data and Records.
While basic guidance and training on this topic is already available, the varied nature of research and the requirements of different disciplines mean that advice rapidly needs to become customized to meet the needs of a specific subject area or research project. The RDM Mentoring Programme aims to respond to this challenge, by offering personalized support for Oxford University researchers over an extended period of time.
The programme has two main elements. First, to establish fruitful relationships between researchers and research data management support staff. This might typically involve:
Secondly, to bring researchers together to share knowledge and experience, as a first step towards building a community of practice, including activities such as:
Although it is likely that the programme will involve more concentrated activity in the early stages, when projects are getting underway, the aim is to establish ongoing relationships with (and between) researchers.
This pilot version of the programme will initially be focused on social science researchers. We hope that it will subsequently be possible to extend the programme to other disciplines.
Researchers interested in participating should email researchdata@ox.ac.uk, by 18th May 2014.
If you’ve seen the University’s new Research Data management website, you may have noticed that we now have a single email address for all enquiries relating to research data management: researchdata@ox.ac.uk. This does not imply that there is just one poor soul chained to a desk somewhere in Wellington Square dealing with all the emails, however.
Lots of people at Oxford have research data management knowledge and expertise. Nobody, however, is an expert in all aspects of data management. This poses a challenge when it comes to offering support to researchers. I know a fair bit about relational databases, funder requirements, and the infrastructure that the University is developing; my colleague Sally Rumsey knows more than anyone could ever really wish to know about descriptive metadata and the Oxford Research Archive; James Cummings is a world expert on text encoding; there are plenty of subject librarians and researchers with a good knowledge of data practices and conventions in particular disciplines; but none of us could really cover everything.
To overcome this, we’ve set up a ‘directory of expertise’, where anyone who thinks they know anything about research data management, and is happy to give advice to others, can enter their contact details and list their particular specialities. We’re hoping that this will enable us to ask the right people for the best advice in response to questions from researchers.
When we receive an email, the email will go into a ticketing system where is can be seen by everyone involved in research data management support, whether they work for Research Services, the IT Services, the Bodleian, or one of the academic departments. The ticket can then be claimed by someone who thinks they have the appropriate skills to respond to it, and they in turn can refer to the directory of expertise to get a second or third opinion if needs be. If it looks as though nobody is volunteering to pick up a ticket, a moderator will either ask one of the support team to deal with it, or take it themselves. We hope that this way we will be able to give each enquirer the support they need. Furthermore, (non-confidential) responses are visible to other members of the support team, so hopefully we will all be able to learn from each others expertise. Let’s hope it works!
If you have expertise in any particular aspect of research data management, and would be happy to impart your wisdom to others, let us know by writing to researchdata@ox.ac.uk, and we will invite you to add your own details to the directory of expertise.
Last week IDCC arrived in San Francisco, land of the start-up, for the annual gathering of the research data management and curation community. My assumption that the stereotype of everyone in this part of the world being involved in some sort of tech start-up was indeed merely a stereotype quickly turned out to be misplaced. The first plenary speaker had started up six biotech companies, and seven of his students had one each. Feeling like the kind of risk-averse loser who was unworthy of admission into the state, let alone the conferences. I slunk into a chair near the back of the hall and started listening for clues as to the Next Big Thing in RDM.
San Francisco
This was my fifth IDCC conference, so it is interesting to note how the topics under discussion have been evolving over a period of quite rapid change. Training staff to assist with data management has been an issue since I first attended, but whereas a few years ago the conversations centred mostly around how to get research data management into librarian training, delegates at IDCC2014 were beginning to think more broadly in terms of what sorts of skills were actually required.
Much attention has been given recently to the role of ‘data scientist’, notoriously described in the Harvard Business Review as the ‘sexiest job of the 21st century’. With an endorsement like that, who wouldn’t want to style themselves a data scientist? But this year’s conference saw a more serious attempt to actually delineate the ways in which research data needs support and who has the skills to provide it. With a large dollop of realism, conference delegates were disabused of the notion that a data curator was the same thing as a data scientist. There seemed to be general resignation to this fact amongst those self-identifying as data curators in the hall. To make matters worse, data curation was described as a ‘janitorial’ role, to quiet groans and slumping shoulders. Not only do we not all have our own start-ups, but it would appear that many of us are essentially janitors. This led into a quite enlightening panel discussion about the various roles, and indeed jobs, that were coming into existence in order to deal with research data, with terms such as ‘data steward’, ‘data governance’, ‘data analyst’, and ‘data curator’ all appearing with greatly increasing frequency in job advertisements, alongside a simultaneous decline in job advertisements for more traditional jobs such as ‘librarian’ or ‘database administrator’ [Ronald Larson]. Former students at American library schools were reporting that they wished more emphasis had been given whilst training to programming skills, change management, and knowledge of ‘domain science processes’ and that they had more opportunity for engagement with scientific research communities [Carole Palmer]. The notion of ‘domain disconnect’ [Liz Lyon], particularly with regards to the ‘hard’ sciences, technology, and engineering disciplines was one that was returned to repeatedly, with the envisaged solution being a greater degree of faculty involvement in information management training.
Other themes included the emergence (or increasing presence) of groups looking to provide international coordination of research data standards and policies. The Research Data Alliance (RDA), which did not yet exist when the last IDCC conference was held, and CODATA, which was formed as long ago as 1966, were both the subjects of keynote presentations. Whereas there had been plenty of examples of national coordination and some at the European level in previous conferences, largely community-organized international coordination struck me as a sign of a maturing field. I was fortunate enough to see an example of how such coordination was actually making a difference (rather than merely providing an excuse for some international travel) at the post-conference FORCE11 workshop on data citation. This involved a number of participants from very different disciplinary and organizational backgrounds working through the unique challenges of consistent data citation in their domains to produce a core set of universally-applicable principles, with specific implementations to follow. Currently seeking endorsements, more about their efforts can be found at their website.
I myself managed to justify my international travel costs on the basis of giving a demonstration of the ever-improving Online Research Database Service (ORDS). It was one of a number of very well-attended software demonstrations that included DataUp, DMPonline, Labtrove, and Archivematica (unfortunately I was unable to witness the last two due to the exigencies of parallel sessions). Gradually tools for easing the burden of data sharing are coming of age and moving from being pilots to mature services that real researchers are really using. It’s almost as exciting as having one’s own start-up, albeit with the JISC and other such agencies standing it for the venture capitalists with dollar bills spilling out of their pockets (or not).
A final, if somewhat frustrating, observation from the conference is that there is still work to do in some universities to convince the support departments of the benefits of collaboration. The same desire for departments to ‘own’ research data management for an institution seems to be as prevalent now as before, whereas I think our experiences at Oxford have indicated that no one department, where the research office, IT Services, or the library really has all the expertise required to provide the best support for its researchers and it helps to work together. This is a theory that we will be putting to the test over the next few months as we launch our single-point-of-contact advisory service, which I’ll write about in another blog post.
It was announced that next year’s conference will be in London, so less glamorous maybe, but at least it won’t be such a drain on the expenses account, and I suspect there won’t be so many start-ups, or data janitors flattering themselves that they’re sexy.
Saints Cyril and Methodius – with the alphabet they invented.
Most people will be aware that February 14th is St Valentine’s day. But among other saints commemorated on this day are a pair of 9th century brothers with an interesting claim to fame – Saints Cyril and Methodius.
Cyril and Methodius were missionaries to the Slavic peoples. They began translating the Bible into what is now known as Old Church Slavonic, but ran up against the problem of the lack of a suitable alphabet. Undeterred, Cyril invented one – the Glagolitic script. This was developed further by their followers, and ultimately formed the basis for Cyrillic, still widely used today.
The challenges Cyril and Methodius faced were similar to those of many researchers working today. They had access to a substantial body of important information; they wanted to share this with a wider audience, and to ensure that it was transmitted accurately and preserved for posterity in a way that would be easily comprehensible. When they found that no existing encoding system was adequate for the task, they set about developing a new one.
Fortunately, few of us today will have to go to the lengths of inventing a new alphabet. We have a much wider range of tools available to help with the process of encoding, communicating, and preserving complex information: things like the Text Encoding Initiative, metadata standards, and text and data repositories, to name but a few.
But though the process may look different now, in many ways the core aims remain the same. Methodius (who was born Michael) even chose to adopt a name that comes from the Greek for ‘pursuit’ or ‘method’, reflecting some key research priorities: persistent pursuit of the truth, conducted in an orderly and methodical way.
So today – amid all the hearts and flowers and love poems – why not also raise a glass to Saints Cyril and Methodius?
