Digital Curation Centre Workshop at Oxford on the 16th June, 2010 – How to Manage Research Data

I am very pleased to announce that the Digital Curation Centre will be paying a visit to Oxford on the 16th June to present a workshop on managing research data. The workshop is aimed primarily at researchers interested in bidding for funding for projects with a data output, although it should also appeal to those who assist and support research activities and who would like to find out more about the challenges of data curation.

Although the workshop will obviously be of relevance to those interested in either the Sudamih or EIDCSR projects, it will not focus exclusively on a particular academic discipline but should be useful across the board. Sessions will include: the roles and responsibilities associated with conceptualising, creating and managing research data during the life of a project; the responsibilities associated with the longer-term management of research data after a project has ended; developing a data management plan; and preparing data for long-term curation and re-use.

The workshop is free for members of the University of Oxford, £50 for non-members.

Anyone interested in attending the workshop should register at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/digital-curation-101/digital-curation-101-lite-oxford

Data management and curation cost modelling

The final report of the Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) project has now been published delivering a survey of data preservation costs, an enhanced curation activity model, four in-depth case studies and a benefits framework .

Oxford, and in particular the research groups participating in EIDCSR, participated as one of the case studies. For this exercise cost information was gathered on activities related to generation of data, local data management as well as the curatorial activities undertaken as part of EIDCSR such as metadata management and long-term archiving.

It is hard to make any inferences from these costs as they represent a snapshoot in time of one particular research project. Nonetheless, the Oxford costs information revealed that:

• generating research data can be extremely expensive,
• local data management may be modestly resourced in comparison with the value of the data,
• start-up curation services, i.e. curation services in the process of development, can also be expensive,
• the cost of established data management services, such as the long-term filestore, can be be rather low in comparison to those services in the process of development.

The report contains more detailed information about the Oxford case study as well as the others including the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service and the National Digital Archive of Datasets.

A new interesting project: Data Management for Bio-Imaging

A new data management project funded by JISC known as Data Management for Bio-Imaging has just created a wiki that will contain relevant information about the project.

The aim of the project is to generate better understanding and planning of data management for bio-imaging within the John Innes Centre

The project plans to document the data flows and infrastructure in the Coen Lab and the JISC Bio-Imaging service. In both cases they use sophisticated instruments such as light microscopy, CCD systems and confocal microscopy generating terabytes of imaging data.

To address their data management needs they are deploying an Open Microscopy Environment known as OMERO which features like:

- Managing and organizing
- Search&Browsing
- 3D Projection
- Metadata, annotation, tagging
- Share, Export, Import

In addition to this, they will train users, including post-docs, to use the system as well as defining strategies to handle user acceptance and encourage image processing.

This is an extremely interesting activity and we´ll surely keep a close eye.

Report on the 'Institutional Policy and Guidance for Research Data' Workshop

'How to share expertise? Where to get advice'? Just two of the questions institutions need to address in their research data management policies according to Paul Taylor of Melbourne University. On the 29^th March 2010, the place for advice and sharing expertise was the EIDCSR Institutional Policy Workshop in Oxford.

A significant part of the ‘Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research’ Project has been to start developing an Institutional research data management policy for the University of Oxford, so this workshop offered us a chance both to say how things were going and find out the lessons learnt from others farther down the road.

The University of Melbourne has been grappling with the issues for some time already, and we were lucky enough to be joined by several of their representatives via videoconference. Indeed, given how close we were to not being joined by their representatives due to the videoconferencing equipment, ‘lucky’ is the operative word. Paul Taylor stressed that any effective policy needs to be implementable. This involves getting the researchers themselves involved in the development process and offering somewhere where people can go for information and advice. Compliance becomes easier the more central services exist, leaving researchers to do the research.

Another university which has already done a lot of work on data curation is Southampton, and Kenji Takeda introduced their long-term ambitions. The unfortunate incident a few years back when Southhampton’s Mountbatton building burnt down led to claims against the lost research data, so this has perhaps focussed minds more there than in other institutions. A cost-benefits analysis is now being undertaken which should help institutions better appreciate the value of their data outputs. Furthermore, they are looking to make data management courses compulsory. Herding academics into classrooms sounds ambitious, but there was a general sense from the workshop that without training there was little chance of persuading researchers to adopt best practices.

Jeff Hayward, from the University of Edinburgh emphasised that when it comes to data curation it is better to identify the opportunities than enumerate the problems, but then failed to ignore the various ‘inhibitors’ to good data management. “Researchers want data management, but don’t want to do it.” Quite. Nevertheless, Edinburgh are bravely forging ahead, setting up an experimental ‘DataShare’ service and adapting the Digital Curation Centre’s 101 training, with the intention of making it compulsory for doctoral students.

Finally, David McAllister of the BBSRC explained data management policies from a Research Council’s point of few – clearly a key driver for institutional policies.

Perhaps the last word should go to Jeff Hayward who concluded the panel questions session by indicating that the world would actually be a happier place if there were fewer data repositories. Individual universities should really act as repositories of last resort, but the onus must be on them to guarantee that research data is not lost or rendered inaccessible.

For a more complete report on the workshop, plus the various sets of slides used by the presenters, go to the EIDCSR Project website: http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/policy_workshop.xml

2nd EIDCSR Workshop "Institutional Policy and Guidance for Research Data" on 29th March 2010

The second EIDCSR Workshop will take place on 29th of March at the Rewley House in Oxford. Following the policy development work undertaken at the University as part of the project, the event will focus on issues around the development and implementation of institutional policy and guidance for research data. A fantastic group of speakers from Oxford, Southampton, Edinburgh, Melbourne and the BBSRC will discuss:

• data management and sharing policy at different levels such as research council, HEI institutions and research departments;
• how research records and data management policy and guidance can be useful to researchers and how to involve researchers in their development;
• how to encourage implementation of institutional policy at a local or departmental level;
• how to encourage across the institution the sharing of best practice in research records and data management.

To book a place please email eidcsr@oucs.ox.ac.uk

Scientific data repositories workshop in Barcelona

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to talk at an incredibly inspiring event organized by the Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya titled "Repositorios de datos cientificos" under their Jornadas Catalanas de Supercomputació.

We had an extraordinary day with a fantastic group of speakers that discussed issues around supporting researchers with their data management as well as disciplinary perspectives provided by real researchers.

The whole event was filmed and is available online (for those who speak spanish!) and I also got interviewed and filmed for online publication known as Global Talent, you can also see this video (again in spanish!).

Data management policy in the University of Oxford

Neil Grindley, our JISC Programme Manager, has just posted "Data Management Policy: An Interview with Paul Taylor" in the JISC Information Environment Team blog.

Dr. Paul Taylor from the University of Melbourne is now finishing a secondment in the University of Oxford as part of the EIDCSR Project. He was instrumental in the development of University of Melbourne's data management policy and his work in Oxford will help producing a draft research records and data management policy together with a plan of action to implement it.

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00/3352123533/