Tag Archives: open data

Data management – one size does not fit all

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As the Research Data Facilitator at the University of Cambridge, I am part of the team establishing a Research Data Management (RDM) Facility at the University. This blog is a note of my impressions from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) meeting held in London on the 28th April 2015: Preparing Data for Deposit.

As always, the DCC meeting was extremely useful for networking. I met with people at similar roles at other institutions. And again, the breakout sessions were invaluable – they allowed us to exchange precious experience, feedback gained and lessons learnt while developing RDM services.

What could have been done better though is more appreciation for differences between universities.

Unrealistic staffing

The talk from the keynote speaker, Louise Corti, the Associate Director at the UK Data Service, was very inspirational. I loved the uplifting expression that RDM supporters are like artists evangelising researchers. It was great to hear about RDM solutions available at the UK Data Service, and the professional approach to research data, with every aspect of data curation addressed by the excellent team of 70 dedicated people, with precise workflows for data processing.

However, how realistic it is for a university to develop similar solutions locally? Which University would be able to dedicate similar amount of resources for the development of an RDM facility?

At the University of Cambridge, I am the only full-time employee dedicated to work on establishment and provision of RDM services to our researchers. There is a team of people supporting the facility but these staff are shared with other projects. I would have very much appreciated what would be the scalable solution that the UK Data Service could recommend universities to develop, knowing that resources available are nowhere near what a 70 people team could offer.

Scalability

On the other hand, we had a presentation from the University of Loughborough. The University, represented by Gary Brewerton, teamed up with Figshare and Arkivum (Mark Hahnel and Matthew Addis, respectively). The three of them explained to us the infrastructure developed to support RDM management at the University of Loughborough. The University data repository, DSpace, has been equipped with archival storage provided by Arkivum, which guarantees 100% data integrity. Additionally, researchers at the University of Loughborough can benefit from the use of Figshare, which provides them with a user-friendly research data sharing platform.

These systems seemed to offer excellent solutions to researchers, but somehow I could not help having the impression of listening to sales pitches. Are there any disadvantages of these solutions? Are there any alternatives?

Figshare charges for the file transfer (downloading of openly accessible data is actually not free for institutions). How substantial would be these charges for bigger institutions, producing huge amounts of valuable research data, frequently sought after and downloaded by others? Would institutions be able to sustain the cost of data access to their most valuable research datasets?

Risk management

The Loughborough solutions do not appear to take into account risks associated with implementation of services from third party providers at bigger, research-intense universities. At the University of Cambridge we have almost 300 EPSRC-funded research grants. In April this year alone our data repository received 40GB of research data deposits coming from EPSRC-funded projects. Producing valuable research outputs is business-critical for universities.

What would be the costs associated with the data transfer of supposedly open-access datasets if these were available via Figshare? Is there any upper limit on possible transfer charges?

What is the long-term risk of handing over university’s research data holdings to a third party service provider? Note that some UK research funders expect data to be stored long-term, and in some cases in perpetuity (10 years from the last access). What will be the conditions for research data storage offered by these external providers in 10, 20, 30 years time? How will the cost change? Will it be easy/possible to transfer all research data somewhere else?

Figshare has recently entered into a legal partnership with Macmillan (you can read more about it in a blog post from Dr Peter Murray-Rust) – how will this partnership evolve in the future?

Suggestion

It would be extremely valuable if RDM solutions proposed at DCC meetings could be discussed taking into account the size of the institution, the amount of research conducted at the University, and the size of the RDM team locally available to work on the implementation of the solution.

One size does not and will not fit all, and a better recognition of differences between organisations would greatly help developing optimal solutions for each individual institution. Additionally, it seems to me of key importance to openly talk about drawbacks of each solution for universities to efficiently mitigate future risks.

Published 14 May 2015
Written by Dr Marta Teperek
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Good news stories about data sharing?

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We have been speaking to researchers around the University recently to discuss the expectations of their funders in relation to data management. This has raised the issue of how best to convince people this is a process that benefits society rather than a waste of time or just yet another thing they are being ‘forced to do’ – which is the perspective of some that we have spoken with.

Policy requirements

In general most funders require a Research Data Management Plan to be developed at the beginning of the project – and then adhered to. But the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have upped the ante by introducing a policy requiring that papers published from May 2015 onwards resulting from funded research include a statement about where the supporting research data may be accessed. The data needs to be available in a secure storage facility with a persistent URL, and that it must be available for 10 years from the last time it was accessed.

Carrot or stick?

While having a policy from funders does make researchers sit up and listen, there is a perception in the UK research community that this is yet another impost on time-poor researchers. This is not surprising. There has recently been an acceleration of new rules about sharing and assessing research.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) occurred last year, and many researchers are still ‘recuperating’. Now the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) is introducing  a policy in April 2016 that any peer reviewed article or conference paper that is to be included in the post-2014 REF must have been deposited to their institution’s repository within three months of acceptance or it cannot be counted.  This policy is a ‘green’ open access policy.

The Research Councils UK (RCUK) have had an open access policy in place for two years, introduced in 1 April 2013, a result of the 2012 Finch Report. The RCUK policy states that funded research outputs must be available open access, and it is permitted to make them available through deposit into a repository. At first glance this seems to align with the HEFCE policy, however, restrictions on the allowed embargo periods mean that in practice most articles must be made available gold open access – usually with the payment of an accompanying article processing charge. While these charges are supported by a block grant fund, there is considerable impost on the institutions to manage these.

There is also considerable confusion amongst researchers about what all these policies mean and how they relate to each other.

Data as a system

We are trying to find some examples about how making research data available can help research and society. It is unrealistic to hope for something along the lines of Jack Akandra‘s breakthrough for a diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer using only open access research.

That’s why I was pleased when Nicholas Gruen pointed me to a report he co-authored: Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target – A Lateral Economics report commissioned by Omidyar Network – published in June 2014.

This report is looking primarily at government data but does consider access to data generated in publicly funded research. It makes some interesting observations about what can happen when data is made available. The consideration is that data can have properties at the system level, not just the individual  level of a particular data set.

The point is that if data does behave in this way, once a collection of data becomes sufficiently large then the addition of one more set of data could cause the “entire network to jump to a new state in which the connections and the payoffs change dramatically, perhaps by several orders of magnitude”.

Benefits of sharing data

The report also refers to a 2014 report The Value and Impact of Data Sharing and Curation: A synthesis of three recent studies of UK research data centres. This work explored the value and impact of curating and sharing research data through three well-established UK research data centres – the Archaeological Data Service, the Economic and Social Data Services, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre.

In summarising the results, Beagrie and Houghton noted that their economic analysis indicated that:

  • Very significant increases in research, teaching and studying efficiency were realised by the users as a result of their use of the data centres;
  • The value to users exceeds the investment made in data sharing and curation via the centres in all three cases; and
  • By facilitating additional use, the data centres significantly increase the measurable returns on investment in the creation/collection of the data hosted.
So clearly there are good stories out there.

If you know of any good news stories that have arisen from sharing UK research output data we would love to hear them. Email us or leave a comment!

Interview with Nigel Shadbolt on The Life Scientific

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Sir Nigel Shadbolt was interviewed on ‘The Life Scientific‘ this morning  on BBC Radio4 about open data.

The general discussion ranged from his background and what got him interested in this area. The data being discussed is more about government public data (such as medical information or cyclist black spots) than that generated in research projects, but an interesting conversation nonetheless. A couple of items that jumped out to me:

16:50 – When we talk about data, really we are talking about information … Data and information and knowledge are kinda different and mostly when we talk about open data we are talking about information. Data (such as a number) only becomes information if it is placed in context. If you can do something with the information then it becomes knowledge – ‘actionable information’. These are different strains of stuff that the computer holds.  We need open information to build knowledge. The semantic web.

16:00 – Do the risks of making data available outweigh the benefits? And do we ask the general public’s opinion or just tell them that this is what we do? They want some sort of empowerment in this but often there is no empowerment.

29:00 – We are barely scratching the surface in terms of the insights as we anlayse and look for patterns in the information.  We are living in a world that is increasingly emitting data – people are increasingly able to collect data onto and off their phones (or supercomputers, depending on how you look at it). This data richness demands a new world for applications we haven’t thought of and ways of analysing the information.

Listen to the half hour interview here.

Blurb from the BBC webpage:

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Southampton University, believes in the power of open data. With Sir Tim Berners-Lee he persuaded two UK Prime Ministers of the importance of letting us all get our hands on information that’s been collected about us by the government and other organisations. But, this has brought him into conflict with people who think there’s money to be made from this data. And open data raises issues of privacy.

Nigel Shadbolt talks to Jim al-Khalili about how a degree in psychology and philosophy lead to a career researching artificial intelligence and a passion for open data.

Published 14 April 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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