Tag Archives: data champions

Researchers championing data – what works?

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Here we follow up on our earlier piece “Creating a research data community”, where Rosie Higman and Hardy Schwamm discussed innovative ways of researcher engagement with research data management.

This blog discusses the outcome from a dedicated Birds of a Feather session at the 9th Research Data Alliance Plenary meeting in Barcelona in April 2017. The session discussed three different programmes for engaging researchers with data management and sharing: University of Cambridge Data Champions programme, TU Delft’s Data Stewardship and SPARC Europe’s Open Data Champions. The purpose of this session was to exchange practice, discuss the difference between the programmes and talk about possible next steps. All presentations from the sessions are available.

Cambridge’s Data Champions

Cambridge’s Data Champions programme was started in Autumn 2016 and is a programme in which researchers volunteered to become a local community expert and advocate on research data management and sharing. The main expectation of those appointed as Data Champions was to run at least one workshop on a topic related to research data management for their research community and to act as the local expert connecting researchers and central data services. In return Champions were offered new networking opportunities, training in research data management and sharing and also a boost to their CVs. Detailed information about the expectations, benefits of becoming a Champion, as well as the support from central services are publicly available.

The Data Champions programme is coordinated during bi-monthly meetings during which Champions exchange practice, talk to each other about their interactions with other researchers and provide each other with advice on tackling some of the data-related challenges. Over time Champions formed a community of practice and the central Research Data Team started to act more as hands-off facilitators of these activities and discussions rather than prescribing Champions what to do and how to best engage with researchers locally. The rationale behind this was that Data Champions would know their own research communities best and would be best positioned to decide what types of training and engagement methods would work for them.

And in fact the Champions delivered quite unexpected and diverse range of outputs. The initial requirement was to deliver a training on research data management to their local communities. The Research Data Management workshop template was shared with the Champions and they were all trained about the content and the methods of the workshop delivery. However, Champions were given discretion on what training they provided and how they wish to deliver. And in fact they developed all sorts of materials and strategies for engaging their local communities: from highly successful regular research data ‘tips’ emails sent to everyone in a department, through data sharing FAQs for chemists and ORCiD drop-in sessions, to organising Electronic Lab Notebooks trials. While certainly interesting and valuable, this also raised a questions as to whether the messages about data management and sharing are still consistent and aligned with the central data services, and also if the high quality of training is maintained.

TU Delft’s Data Stewardship programme

Madeleine de Smaele from TU Delft spoke about their Data Stewardship programme. The goal of the programme is to create mature working practices and policies for research data management across each of the eight faculties at TU Delft, so that any project can make sure their data is managed well. The programme is part of the broader Open Science agenda at TU Delft, which aims to make research more accessible and more re-usable. In contrast to the hands-off and decentralised Data Champions programme at Cambridge, TU Delft’s Data Stewardship programme has a solid framework as its core: a team of eight Data Stewards (a dedicated Data Steward for each one of eight TU Delft’s faculties), led centrally by the Data Stewardship Coordinator.

Data Stewards are disciplinary experts, who are embedded within faculties, and are able to understand and address the specific data management needs of their research communities. However, thanks to working as a team, which is centrally coordinated, the work of Data Stewards is coherent and aligned. This is reflected for example in research data policy development. TU Delft will have a central policy framework for research data management; however, it is Data Stewards working with their faculties who will develop research data policies, tailored to specific needs of individual faculties.

SPARC Europe’s Open Data Champions

SPARC Europe’s Open Data Champions initiative took yet a different approach from Cambridge and TU Delft and it aims to help promote the use of ambassadors or champions in the scientific community to help unlock more scientific data. The focus of the Open Data Champions Initiative is to achieve cultural change needed to see more research data shared and re-used.

Similarly to their previous SPARC Europe’s Open Access Champions initiative, the rationale behind the Open Data Champions is that activists who stimulate cultural change need to be promoted and supported to effect greater, speedier, more motivated research-driven change to help make Open the default in Europe. SPARC Europe wants to identify Champions at different career levels (from PhD students to vice chancellors), from a range of disciplines and from a variety of European countries to inspire broad range of stakeholders.

Are the programmes really effective?

After short presentations about the three programmes, the attendees started discussing different aspects of all programmes: their different aims, audiences, reward systems and sustainability of these activities. Perhaps the most interesting discussion was around measuring the effectiveness of these initiatives. All three programmes aim to ultimately achieve cultural change towards better data management and greater openness. Are the programmes all equally effective at achieving cultural change? Or are perhaps different modes of engagement bringing different results? How to measure cultural change?

And, finally, what are the costs and benefits of each programme? TU Delft’s Data Stewardship programme, with discipline-specific Data Stewards, is more resource-intensive than Cambridge’s Data Champions relying on researchers volunteering their time; both programmes are however more costly than SPARC Europe’s Open Data Champions.

Need for international collaboration and practice exchange

Our discussions brought more questions than answers but we all agreed that the exchange of ideas and practice was productive and useful. Many attendees expressed their interest for starting dedicated researcher engagement programmes at their institutions. Therefore, one of the main conclusions of the session was that it would be valuable to create a forum where those running programmes for researcher engagement could regularly discuss their programmes, exchange ideas and problem-solve jointly. This is particularly important for difficult questions, which the community struggles to address, such as metrics for assessing cultural change in data management and sharing. Working collaboratively can prove incredibly efficient, which was recently demonstrated by a teamwork effort which led to the development of metrics for assessment of data management training programmes.

Next steps

As a next step to extend our conversations and start identifying solutions to common problems, the University of Cambridge, SPARC Europe and Jisc are co-organising a dedicated event “Engaging Researchers in Good Data Management” on 15 November 2017 in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The event intends to bring together those working to support and engage researchers with open research and Research Data Management (RDM), including librarians, scholarly communication specialists and researchers from both the sciences and humanities. So if you are reading this blog post and would like to be part of these discussions, do come and join!

Published 15 September 2017
Written by Dr Marta Teperek
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Creating a research data community

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Are research institutions engaging their researchers with Research Data Management (RDM)? And if so, how are they doing it? In this post, Rosie Higman (@RosieHLib), Research Data Advisor, University of Cambridge, and Hardy Schwamm (@hardyschwamm),  Research Data Manager, Lancaster University explore the work they are doing in their respective institutions.

Whilst funder policies were the initial catalyst for many RDM services at UK universities there are many reasons to engage with RDM, from increased impact to moving towards Open Research as the new normal. And a growing number of researchers are keen to get involved! These reasons also highlight the need for a democratic, researcher-led approach if the behavioural change necessary for RDM is to be achieved. Following initial discussions online and at the Research Data Network event in Cambridge on 6 September, we wanted to find out whether and how others are engaging researchers beyond iterating funder policies.

At both Cambridge and Lancaster we are starting initiatives focused on this, respectively Data Champions and Data Conversations. The Data Champions at Cambridge will act as local experts in RDM, advocating at a departmental level and helping the RDM team to communicate across a fragmented institution. We also hope they will form a community of practice, sharing their expertise in areas such as big data and software preservation. The Lancaster University Data Conversations will provide a forum to researchers from all disciplines to share their data experiences and knowledge. The first event will be on 30 January 2017.

RDMFBreakoutHaving presented our respective plans to the RDM Forum (RDMF16) in Edinburgh on 22nd November we ran breakout sessions where small groups discussed the approaches our and other universities were taking, the results summarised below highlighting different forms that engagement with researchers will take.

Targeting our training

RDM workshops seem to be the most common way research data teams are engaging with researchers, typically targeting postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers. A recurrent theme was the need to target workshops for specific disciplinary groups, including several workshops run jointly between institutions where this meant it was possible to get sufficient participants for smaller disciplines. Alongside targeting disciplines some have found inviting academics who have experience of sharing their data to speak at workshops greatly increases engagement.

As well as focusing workshops so they are directly applicable to particular disciplines, several institutions have had success in linking their workshop to a particular tangible output, recognising that researchers are busy and are not interested in a general introduction. Examples of this include workshops around Data Management Plans, and embedding RDM into teaching students how to use databases.

An issue many institutions are having is getting the timing right for their workshops: too early and research students won’t have any data to manage or even be thinking about it; too late and students may have got into bad data management habits. Finding the goldilocks time which is ‘just right’ can be tricky. Two solutions to this problem were proposed: having short online training available before a more in-depth training later on, and having a 1 hour session as part of an induction followed by a 2 hour session 9-18 months into the PhD.

Tailored support

Alongside workshops, the most popular way to get researchers interested in RDM was through individual appointments, so that the conversation can be tailored to their needs, although this obviously presents a problem of scalability when most institutions only have one individual staff member dedicated to RDM.

IMG_20161122_121401There are two solutions to this problem which were mentioned during the breakout session. Firstly, some people are using a ‘train the trainer’ approach to involve other research support staff who are based in departments and already have regular contact with researchers. These people can act as intermediaries and are likely to have a good awareness of the discipline-specific issues which the researchers they support will be interested in.

The other option discussed was holding drop-in sessions within departments, where researchers know the RDM team will be on a regular basis. These have had mixed success at many institutions but seem to work better when paired with a more established service such as the Open Access or Impact team.

What RDM services should we offer?

We started the discussion at the RDM Forum thinking about extending our services beyond sheer compliance in order to create an “RDM community” where data management is part of good research practice and contributes to the Open Research agenda. This is the thinking behind the new initiatives at Cambridge and Lancaster.

However, there were also some critical or sceptical voices at our RDMF16 discussions. How can we promote an RDM community when we struggle to persuade researchers being compliant with institutional and funder policies? All RDM support teams are small and have many other tasks aside from advocacy and training. Some expressed concern that they lack the skills to market our services beyond the traditional methods used by libraries. We need to address and consider these concerns about capacity and skill sets as we attempt to engage researchers beyond compliance.

Summary

It is clear from our discussions that there is a wide variety of RDM-related activities at UK universities which stretch beyond enforcing compliance, but engaging large numbers of researchers is an ongoing concern. We also realised that many RDM professionals are not very good at practising what we preach and sharing our materials, so it’s worth highlighting that training materials can be shared on the RDM training community on Zenodo as long as they have an open license.

Many thanks to the participants at our breakout session at the RDMForum 16, and Angus Whyte for taking notes which allowed us to write this piece. You can follow previous discussions on this topic on Gitter.

Published on 30 November
Written by Rosie Higman and Hardy Schwamm
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