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/

EIDCSR technical analysis: from soft to hard

After having conducted the EIDCSR audit and requirements analysis exercise, we have started converting the high level requirements gathered into technical requirements. The idea is to produce a systems design document for a Systems Developer to start with the implementation. Howard Noble, from Computing Services, is leading this exercise for the next two months.

To start with the technical analysis, Howard and I have had a very fruitful meeting this morning. We have brainstormed ideas for a high level system design trying to identify the practical things that can be done to support the data management workflows of the research groups taking part in EIDCSR.

Using a board to produce a "rich picture" recording the processes we have encountered and our thoughts was extremely useful. We will now produce a "cleaner" version of this picture and bring it forward to key people in the research groups in a workshop. This will hopefully helps us to communicate what the project aims to achieve as well as getting feedback on the design so that researchers requirements drive any development .

First EIDCSR workshop and executive board meeting

Yesterday was a busy day for the EIDCSR Project.

In the morning, the first project event took place at Rewley House in Oxford with an exciting group of speakers brought together under the theme of "Data curation: from lab to reuse". Their presentations are now available on the project website and a report will be produced shortly.

The afternoon served to held the first EIDCSR Executive Board meeting where progress and next steps for the project

were discussed with the extraordinary helpful and encouraging members of the board.

Overall, a great day providing loads of food for thought.

"Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem"

The New York Times has an article about future scientists' ability to manage the large amounts of digital data being generated and how the likes of IBM or Google are trying to help, "Training to Climb an Everest of Digital Data", http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/technology/12data.html. IBM and Google are contributing tools, computational power and access to large-scale datasets. It was actually two years ago this month that Google and IBM announced their partnership to provide universities with dedicated cluster computing resources, open source software, a dedicated website for collaboration, and a Creative Commons-licensed curriculum. In April this year the NSF funded projects at 14 US universities to take advantage of the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative. The New York Times article highlights some of these projects. The emphasis is certainly on the massive -- big compute clusters, big datasets -- and on data analysis. Not much though on the ongoing management of, access to, and preservation of data, even if Professor Jimmy Lin (University of Maryland) is quoted as saying, “Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem”.