Monthly Archives: February 2016

Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing

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In 2015 the Cambridge Research Data Team organised several discussions between funders and researchers. In May 2015 we hosted Ben Ryan from EPSRC, which was followed by a discussion with Michael Ball from BBSRC in August. Now we have invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers.

David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) met with our academics on Friday 22 January at the Gurdon Institute. The Gurdon Institute was founded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and CRUK to promote research in the areas of developmental biology and cancer biology, and to foster a collaborative environment for independent research groups with diverse but complementary interests.

This blog summarises the presentations and discusses the data sharing expectations from Wellcome Trust and CRUK. A second related blog ‘In conversation with Wellcome Trust and CRUK‘ summarises the question and answer session that was held with a group of researchers on the same day.

Wellcome Trust’s requirements for data management and sharing

Sharing research data is key for Wellcome’s goal of improving health

David Carr started his presentation explaining that the Wellcome Trust’s mission is to support research with the goal of improving health. Therefore, the Trust is committed to ensuring research outputs (including research data) can be accessed and used in ways that will maximise health and societal benefits. David reminded the audience of benefits of data sharing. Data which is shared has the potential to:

  • Enable validity and reproducibility of research findings to be assessed
  • Increase the visibility and use of research findings
  • Enable research outputs to be used to answer new questions
  • Reduce duplication and waste
  • Enable access to data to other key communities – public, policymakers, healthcare professionals etc.

Data sharing goes mainstream

David gave on overview of data sharing expectations from various angles. He started by referring to the Royal Society’s report from 2012: Science as an open enterprise, which sets sharing as the standard for doing science. He then also mentioned other initiatives like the G8 Science Ministers’ statement, the joint report from the Academy of Medical Sciences, BBSRC, MRC and Wellcome Trust on reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research and the UK Concordat on Open Research Data with a take-home message that sharing data and other research outputs is increasingly becoming a global expectation, and a core element of good research practice.

Wellcome Trust’s policy for open data

The next aspect of David’s presentation was Wellcome Trust’s policy on data management and sharing. The policy was first published almost a decade ago (2007) with subsequent modifications in 2010. The principle of the policy is simple: research data should be shared and preserved in a manner which maximises its value to advance research and improve health. Wellcome Trust also requires data management plans as a compulsory part of grant applications, where the proposed research is likely to generate a dataset that will have significant value to researchers and other users. This is to ensure that researchers understand the importance of data management and sharing and to plan for it from the start their projects.

Cost of data sharing

Planning for data management and sharing involves costing for these activities in the grant proposal. The Wellcome Trust’s FAQ guidance on data sharing policy says that: “The Trust considers that timely and appropriate data management and sharing should represent an integral component of the research process. Applicants may therefore include any costs associated with their proposed approach as part of their proposal.” David then outlined the types of costs that can be included in grant applications (including for dedicated staff, hardware and software, and data access costs). He noted that in the current draft guidance on costing for data management estimated costs for long-term preservation that extend beyond the lifetime of the grant are not eligible, although costs associated with the deposition of data in recognised data repositories can be requested.

Key priorities and emerging areas in data management and sharing

Infrastructure

The Wellcome Trust also identified key priorities and emerging areas where work needs to be done to better support of data management and sharing. The first one was to provide resources and platforms for data sharing and access. David pointed out that wherever available, discipline-specific data repositories are the best home for research data, as they provide rich metadata standards, community curation and better discoverability of datasets.

However, the sustainability of discipline-specific repositories is sometimes uncertain. Discipline-specific resources are often perceived as ‘free’. However, research data submitted to ‘free’ data repositories has to be stored somewhere and the amount of data produced and shared is growing exponentially – someone has to pay for the cost of storage and long-term curation in discipline-specific data repositories. An additional point for consideration is that many disciplines do not have their own repositories and therefore need to heavily rely on institutional support.

Access

Wellcome Trust funds a large number of projects in clinical areas. Dealing with patient data requires careful ethical considerations and planning from the very start of the project to ensure that data can be successfully shared at the end of the project. To support researchers in dealing with patient data The Expert Advisory Group on Data Access (a cross-funder advisory body established by MRC, ESRC, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust) has developed guidance documents and practice papers about handling of sensitive data: how to ask for informed consent, how to anonymise data and the procedures that need to be in place when granting access to data. David stressed that balance needs to be struck between maximising the use of data and the need to safeguard research participants.

Incentives for sharing

Finally, if sharing is to become the normal thing to do, researchers need incentives to do so. Wellcome Trust is keen to work with others to ensure that researchers who generate and share datasets of value receive appropriate recognition for their efforts. A recent report from the Expert Advisory Group on Data Access proposed several recommendations to incentivise data sharing, with specific roles for funders, research leaders, institutions and publishers. Additionally, in order to promote data re-use, the Wellcome Trust joined forces with the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and launched the Open Science Prize competition to encourage prototyping and development of services, tools or platforms that enable open content.

Cancer Research UK’s views on data sharing

The next talk was by Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK. Jamie started by saying that because Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is a charity funded by the public, it needs to ensure it makes the most of its funded research: sharing research data is elemental to this. Making the most of the data generated through CRUK grants could help accelerate progress towards the charity’s aim in its research strategy, to see three quarters of people surviving cancer by 2034. Jamie explained that his post – Research Funding Manager (Data) – has been created as a reflection of data sharing being increasingly important for CRUK.

The policy

Jamie started talking about the key principles of CRUK data sharing policy by presenting the main issues around research data sharing and explaining the CRUK’s position in relation to them:

  • What needs to be shared? All research data, including unpublished data, source code, databases etc, if it is feasible and safe to do so. CRUK is especially keen to ensure that data underpinning publications is made available for sharing.
  • Metadata: Researchers should adhere to community standards/minimum information guidelines where these exist.
  • Discoverability: Groups should be proactive in communicating the contents of their datasets and showcasing the data available for sharing

Jamie explained that CRUK really wants to increase the discoverability of data. For example, clinical trials units should ideally provide information on their websites about the data they generate and clear information about how it can be accessed.

  • Modes of sharing: Via community or generalist repositories, under the auspices of the PI or a combination of methods

Jamie explained that not all data can be/should be made openly available. Due to ethical considerations sometimes access to data will have to be restricted. Jamie explained that as long as restrictions are justified, it is entirely appropriate to use them. However, if access to data is restricted, the conditions on which access will be granted should be considered at the project outset, and these conditions will have to be clearly outlined in metadata descriptions to ensure fair governance of access.

  • Timeframes: Limited period of exclusive use permitted where justified

Jamie suggested adhering to community standards when thinking about any periods of exclusive use of generated research data. In some communities research data is made accessible at the time of publication. Other communities will expect data release at the time of generation (especially in collaborative genomics projects). Jamie further explained that particularly in cases where new data can affect policy development, it is key that research data is released as soon as possible.

  • Preservation: Data to be retained for at least 5 years after grant end
  • Acknowledgement: Secondary users of data should credit original researcher and CRUK
  • Costs: Appropriately justified costs can be included in grant proposals

As of late 2015, financial support for data management and sharing can be requested as a running cost in grant applications. Jamie explained that there are no particular guidelines in place explaining eligible and non-eligible costs and that the most important aspect is whether the costs are well justified or not, and reasonable in the context of the research envisaged.

Jamie stressed that the key point of the CRUK policy is to facilitate data sharing and to engage with the research community, recognising the challenges of data sharing for different projects and the need to work through these collaboratively, rather than enforce the policy in a top-down fashion.

Policy implementation

Subsequently, the presentation discussed ways in which CRUK policy is implemented. Jamie explained that the main tool for the policy implementation is the new requirement for data management plans as compulsory part of grant applications.

Two of the three main response mode committees: Science Committee and Clinical Research Committee have a two-step process of writing a data management plan. During the grant application stage researchers need to write a short, free-form description about how they plan to adhere to CRUK’s policy on data sharing. Only if the grant is accepted, the beneficiary will be asked to write a more detailed data management plan, in consultation with CRUK representatives.

This approach serves two purposes as it:

  • ensures that all applicants are aware of CRUK’s expectations on data sharing (they all need to write a short paragraph about data sharing)
  • saves researchers’ time: only those applicants who were successful will have to provide a detailed data management plan, and it allows the CRUK office to engage with successful applicants on data sharing challenges and opportunities

In contrast, applicants for the other main CRUK response mode committee, the Population Research Committee, all fill out a detailed data management and sharing plan at application stage because of the critical importance of sharing data from cohort and epidemiological studies.

Outlooks for the future

Similarly to the Wellcome Trust, CRUK realised that cultural change is needed for sharing to become the normality. CRUK have initiated many national and international partnerships to help the reward of data sharing.

One of them is a collaboration with the YODA (Yale Open Data Access) project aiming to develop metrics to monitor and evaluate data sharing. Other areas of collaborative work include collaboration with other funders on development of guidelines on ethics of data management and sharing, platforms for data preservation and discoverability, procedures for working with population and clinical data. Jamie stressed that the key thing for CRUK is to work closely with researchers and research managers – to understand the challenges and work through these collaboratively, and consider exciting new initiatives to move the data sharing field forwards.

Links

Published 5 February 2016
Written by Dr Marta Teperek, verified by David Carr and Jamie Enoch
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What does a researcher do all day?

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Recently, Paul Jervis-Heath* came to speak to Cambridge Libraries staff about work he had done as part of the Cambridge Libraries user centred design programme during the previous academic year.

This project was trying to establish how Cambridge University administrative services would manage the RCUK block grant provided to the University to support the RCUK Open Access policy. The end goal of the project was to design products and services, so the team of six working on the programme needed to start by trying to understand what academics did and what services they needed.

Information gathering process

During the project the team worked with 56 academics including contextual interviews with 34 academics. Paul noted however that it was also important to see the environments they were working in to ‘get into the headspaces’ of who they were designing for.

To this end the team shadowed 10 academics over a 48-hour period. They followed them through their day, literally sitting next to them. They watched lectures, sat in supervisions and took notes. As researchers did tasks the team asked questions about how they felt about the task – whether it was worth their time for example. The number was small because of the time intensity of this approach, however the process revealed good insights. Paul mentioned that they looked at the workarounds academics have for tasks and were able to determine how academics know what is succeeding and what ought they be doing.

The information gathering phase also included 12 co-design sessions looking at research and publishing tools, where they invited a group of participants to act as a designer. These were one on one co-design sessions. The academics were asked to design the journal they would like to publish in. As part of the process they took notes about how the participants talked about the publishing process.

This process is referred to as ‘bootstrapping’. The project was not pretending to have the full picture of what academic life is like. However the findings are robust enough to form an idea of what academics are doing to then create something and take it back to the participants to be refined  based on feedback.

Wearing lots of hats

Academics have lots of roles and they get split both between the University and their College and between their teaching and research roles. Paul noted that being an academic is really three or four jobs – each person needs to decide what they will be very good at. He observed that academics have to discover things that are new to the world as well as all of their other administration and work.

Many of the academics observed had between six and eight, sometimes 10 different roles. Some of these come with a job title, and others are unofficial because the academic wants to be a good supervisor, tutor, or a good colleague. The longer someone is around, the more roles they collect. The team started trying to graph people’s job titles as part of the project but this proved challenging because academia is not like a company where people have a fixed job title. Paul described it as more like a series of badges where an academic gets new things ‘pinned on’.

Academics are both teachers and researchers. Paul noted it is always interesting to see which one the participants mentioned first, their teaching role or their research role.

Teaching

Teaching takes up most of the term time and there is no time for research other than, say, putting together reading lists. For most researchers, about 20 minutes is the time length they have available for anything. This is how they carve up their day.

Everybody teaching at Cambridge is a University Teaching Officer – which has four levels. People start off as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, then Reader, the Professor. There are additional roles like the Head of Department, which typically rotates as a two year position. Then there are people who are Director of Studies both within a department and in the Colleges. Tutors look after the pastoral element of life in the College. And that’s just teaching roles.

Research

The other side of the coin is the research roles. People start as Research Associates where they are hired for a specific research project which means there is nothing to move onto, so the person might have to move to a new university. Postdocs often don’t have anywhere to go they tend to use libraries, coffee shops and working from home. For many people the College is their office.

Gaining a Junior Research Fellowship is an important step because the University is funding the research in some way, however most positions are a fixed length. Having your JRF means they know where they are going to be. The next step is a Senior Research Fellow, then Principal Investigator. In science research happens in groups and the Principal Investigator leads the project.

Many people likened running a research group as running a small company while remaining research active. The Principal Investigator is similar to managing director of a small company. Some of these activities they don’t have any real training for. No-one has told them how to manage expenditure of a research project, or how to interview people. Several people noted that the hardest thing is recruitment not least because often candidates are abroad and interviews happen over Skype and Google Hangout. There is a big element of doubt about who they have employed.

Often collaborations are across time zones so researchers are fitting in calls in the early morning and evening to allow for time zones.

Academic roles in detail

The academic roles tended to fall into the following areas:

  • College role – Supporting students, Public relations administration, research, consultancy teaching
  • Personal administration – Travel arrangements, updating diary, updating CV and publication lists
  • College administration – committee meetings and reading papers, reviewing and interviewing candidates for the college, selecting the admissions.
  • Supporting students – both academic and pastorally, for example providing information about the college or problems with students not coping with work or taking students to hospital.
  • Teaching –
    • Lectures (including preparation and planning curriculum, getting lecture rooms, sorting out timetables.
    • Putting slides and demos and reading list up in the course Moodle.
    • Writing the exam papers, preparing materials they will need.
    • Final issues like meeting the lab technicians, marking the exams.
  • Research –
    • Applying for grant funding involves obtaining quotes from suppliers and partners to go into applications, creating budgets meeting funders, writing applications, research project management.
    • Setting up experiments, and gathering data and analysing results.
    • A large amount of writing to tell people about it and published – it doesn’t count unless it is published in a good journal. Lots of work in formatting and editing and the reviewing.
    • There is informal work – peer reviews. For journals official peer review is usually predicated by informal peer review – people will review each other’s papers to increase chances of getting accepted.
    • Managing research groups – running meetings setting goals, managing expenditure, writing job descriptions, recruitment, approving leave
    • Once published all the outreach – including listing the work in Symplectic, seminars, going to conferences and doing speaking engagements. Going to London to be interviewed.
  • Consultancy – meeting collaborators

Disciplinary differences in research

Disciplines differ immensely from one another but not necessarily in the ways traditionally thought of. Rather than there being a Science versus Humanities divide, a more accurate way of thinking about types of research relate to whether the work is being done in a group or by a solo researcher.

The size of the research group is partly determined by the expense of the equipment. Research such as that done by CERN is very expensive and requires grants. In AHSS there is less of a need for external funding (or possibly less money available funding). Note that Junior or Senior Research Fellows tend to be funded by the University but Principal Investigators are often funded through grants.

The pace of the discipline changes how people publish – in fast disciplines there are shorter units of publication, and slower disciplines have longer ones. Physics is very fast discipline so they upload pre-prints to arXiv.org. For example the role of journals in physics is not as important as biology.

Transparency changes across disciplines as well. For example physics is very open and biology is secretive – even colleagues often don’t know what others are working on. Transparency can be measured by the competitiveness of the discipline. It can affect the discipline of the research groups – some are open, others are secretive.

The structure of research groups

Research groups were a surprise to Paul. Members do not work together like you do on a project team. Research groups manifest as a set of researchers following their own interests but generally working in the same area. The researchers share methods and equipment but otherwise they are doing their own thing.

Some groups are supportive with mentoring but others are really competitive. Sometimes this comes from the research group and other times it comes from the people in the group. This appears to be led by the discipline culture of where they come from. It is worth noting that while anecdotally Cambridge people have more freedom, in Cambridge there is a cultural tendency not to show any weakness.

Day in the life graphics

Paul then took the group through the ‘day in the life’ diagrams created out of the shadowing done in Michaelmas Term 2013 (October to December). The graphics he discussed included:

The vertical axis reflects how happy the academic was over the day. High points tend to coincide with having contact with people and talking about their discipline such as discussions with PhD students, or with a research group. However lecturing is not a high point because there is no two-way communication – all the students sit at the back, the lecturer only gets feedback get at the end.

What causes one of the greatest emotional lows for a researcher is being rejected for a paper. They have often put all of their effort and knowledge into a journal paper. If it is rejected after peer review they are being told they have wasted two years of their life. Paul noted that some reviewing boards are brutal and the feedback given is, frankly, rude.

There is a similar low point if an application for grant funding is unsuccessful – it is similar to a rejection. Grant funding applications are worse than a paper as the researcher has to argue why the work is important and why the funder should fund it. Generally funding bodies are not as brutal but they are awarding funding to competitors – so it is a double blow.

Research and publishing experience map

Paul also talked the group through the Research and Publishing Experience Map. As part of the project the team was looking to see if the University was involved in the publishing process in terms of helping it. However the team found that there is no contact with the University during the process of research and publishing. There was no official checkpoint where academics had to tell the University about what they were doing. While there might be a discussion between the person and their supervisor, it is not recorded anywhere.

The research group will know where articles have been submitted, but the information is not captured anywhere – except in their inbox. But in research groups people move on so even a shared memory is lost. So there is no way to collect data, and no place to archive the administration for researchers. While the Research Office knows about the research grant, what a researcher does with the money is up to them. There are not many official touch points with the University.

The result of this work was a need to artificially engineer a touch point with the academics to ensure that they are able to meet their compliance requirements. The www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk upload system is the result.

* Paul now works for a consulting company Modern Human

Published 1 February 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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