Drivers and Responses toward Research Data Management Maturity: Transatlantic Perspectives

1. Drivers and Responses Toward
Research Data Management Maturity:
Transatlantic Perspectives
Jan Cheetham • Rory Macneil • Brianna Marshall • Robin Rice

2. Take the online version of our
RDM maturity survey at:
tinyurl.com/edu15RDM
Please include #edu15RDM
in your tweets!

3. About Us
Brianna Marshall
Lead, Research Data Services
UW-Madison
Jan Cheetham
Research Cyberinfrastructure
Liaison
UW-Madison
Robin Rice
Data Librarian
University of Edinburgh
Rory Macneil
CEO
Research Space

4. Session Overview
UW-Madison (USA)
• Drivers
• Organizational responses
• Components
University of Edinburgh (UK)
• Drivers
• Organizational responses
Research Space (UK)
• Components
Survey results and open discussion: How do we define RDM maturity?

6. Drivers: External Funder Mandates
• Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo
• Released spring 2013; took effect fall 2015
• Requires open sharing of published articles and data
• Publication repository is provided; data repository is not
• Applies to agencies with $100M + in R&D
• Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR)
• Identical bills introduced to House and Senate in spring
2013
• Requires open sharing of published articles
• Must be passed into law to take effect
• Applies to agencies with $100M + in extramural
spending

7. Drivers: Organizational
• Compliance with external requirements
• Stewardship of institutional assets
• Safeguarding reproducibility and intellectual
property
• Enabling research that is increasingly data-
driven and collaborative

8. Drivers: Researcher needs and changing
work patterns
• Ample technology to generate data but few skills to
manage it effectively
• Movement toward openness, impacted by OSTP and
spurred by early career researcher expectations
• Disciplinary culture shifts toward data reuse +
reproducibility
• Need for multi-purpose online spaces to collaborate,
share, store, and archive research outputs (including
data)

9. Organizational responses: Delivery
Focus of delivery has been on:
• Policies
• Tools
• RDM expertise
• Education/outreach for researchers
Challenges
• Who owns RDM?
• How do you staff RDM?
• Who pays for RDM?

10. Components: Policies
Data governance
• Policies and standards
• Information quality
• Privacy, compliance, security
• Architecture, integration
Data stewardship policy
• Retention for 7 years or more
• PI is steward

11. Components: Tools
On Premises Storage Institutional Repository
Electronic Lab Notebooks Box

12. Components: Expertise and staffing
Library
• Research Data Services
• Liaison librarians
Central IT
• Engagement staff
Advanced Computing
• Facilitators
• Faculty (Data Carpentry)
Disciplines
• Staff experts in privacy, data
analysis, documentation,
sharing

13. Components: Outreach and education
DMP Consultations
Workshops
Researcher challenges:
• Common data curation methods
in research groups
• Long-term archiving resources
• Need to focus resources on data
analysis phase, keeping up with
hardware and software changes
• Restrictive policies

15. Drivers: External
Funder mandates:
• ESRC & NERC have long-standing data archiving policies
• Research Councils UK publish Common Principles on Data
Policy, 2011
• EPSRC turns tables, makes institutions responsible, 2012,
full compliance expected by May 2015
• European Commission Horizon2020 funding includes ‘Open
Data Pilot’
• Overall, data management plans expected for funded
research
Publishers’ policies to mandate making data available helps too

16. Drivers: Organizational
• FOI legislation - University
of East Anglia ‘climategate’
negative publicity
• Desire to showcase all
research outputs
• Desire to support
researchers to comply with
funder policies
• Promote research integrity /
avoid scientific fraud
• Mostly - not to lose EPSRC
funding!
http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/UK-cops-close-
Climategate-investigation-20120718

17. Drivers: Researcher needs and changing
work patterns
• Open Access publication mandates driving culture change
• Importance of UK Research Excellence Framework
• Shifting (generational?) norms about sharing & social media
• ‘Impact agenda’ & altmetrics
• Larger, broader collaborations
• Data-driven science
• Discipline-specific changes,
• eg AllTrials.net campaign
• Slowly changing perception of data as ‘first class research
object’

18. Organizational responses: Structural
University of Edinburgh Information Services takes up
mantle:
• Library, Computing Service & Data Library
Early projects set the tone:
• DISC-UK DataShare and Data Asset Framework (DAF)
‘Enabling’ (and first) UK university RDM policy, May 2011
RDM Roadmap to implement policy, 2012-present:
• Fit to data lifecycle: planning, active storage, stewardship
Governance
• Academic-led steering group

19. Organizational responses: Priorities
• Support for Data Management Planning, DMPOnline tool
customization, template
• Half terabyte per researcher storage with Dropbox-like
functions (DataStore, DataSync)
• Open Access data repository (Edinburgh DataShare)
• Long term Data Vault (private storage)
• Awareness raising, training, joining up support functions
http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra

20. Organizational responses: Delivery
• RDM ‘action group’
• Raising awareness has a number of challenges
• CIO has been crucial champion of the cause
• Interaction with schools (departments)
• Next step: moving from umbrella of (confusing) services
to a unified and comprehensive research data service
under a service management framework

21. ELN as integrating RDM component
at Edinburgh
An online tool used by researchers in biology, chemistry,
biomedicine and related fields to collect and share
research data
Connected ELN
An ELN designed to integrate with core RDM
components at an institution level including file
storage, repositories and archives
Standalone ELN
A standalone tool used by individual labs
Electronic Lab Notebook

22. ▶ Individual researchers
Ease of use
▶ Research data managers
Integration with RDM
infrastructure
▶ IT managers
Ease of deployment
and administration
Connected ELN challenge:
Satisfy four sets of requirements
Researchers Administrators
▶ PrincipaI Investigators
Lab management

23. Repository
Archive
Data
Files
Data Data
Data
ELN
Standalone ELN Workflow
Institutional
file stores
Lab
file stores

24. Results
ELN just another silo
Storage Repository Archive ELN
Data does not get captured by institution

25. Data
Data, file links
and metadata
Data, file links
and metadata
RSpace Connected ELN at Edinburgh
Lab
file stores
Data
DataStore
Repository
Archive
Researchers Administrators

26. Enabling institution to capture more high
quality research data, fulfilling funder
requirements for data preservation and
availability
RSpace@Edinburgh brings together
RDM tools and researcher workflow

27. RDM Maturity Survey

28. RDM Maturity
• Comments on presentations and/or ideas in
the survey?
• What does RDM maturity mean to you?
• What is your institution focusing on to reach
maturity?

29. Help Us Improve and Grow
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