Tag Archives: funders

Show me the money – the path to a sustainable Research Data Facility

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Like many institutions in the UK, Cambridge University has responded to research funders’ requirements for data management and  sharing with a concerted effort to support our research community in good data management and sharing practice through our Research Data Facility. We have written a few times on this blog and presented to describe our services. This blog is a description of the process we have undertaken to support these services in the long term.

Funders expect  that researchers make the data underpinning their research available and provide a link to this data in the paper itself. The EPSRC started checking compliance with their data sharing requirement on 1 May 2015. When we first created the Research Data Facility we spoke to many researchers across the institution and two things became very clear. One was that there was considerable confusion about what actually counts as data, and the second was that sharing data on publication is not something that can be easily done as an afterthought if the data was not properly managed in the first place.

We have approached these issues separately. To try and determine what is actually required from funders beyond the written policies we have invited representatives from our funders to come to discussions and forums with our researchers to work out the details. So far we have hosted Ben Ryan from the EPSRC, Michael Ball from the BBSRC and most recently David Carr and Jamie Enoch from the Wellcome Trust and CRUK respectively.

Dealing with the need for awareness of research data management has been more complex. To raise awareness of good practice in data management and sharing we embarked on an intense advocacy programme and in the past 15 months have organised 71 information sessions about data sharing (speaking with over 1,700 researchers). But we also needed to ensure the research community was managing its data from the beginning of the research process. To assist this we have developed workshops on various aspects of data management (hosting 32 workshops in the past year), a comprehensive website, a service to support researchers with their development of their research data management plans and a data management consultancy service.

So far, so good. We have had a huge response to our work, and while we encourage researchers to use the data repository that best suits their material, we do offer our institutional repository Apollo as an option. We are as of today, hosting 499 datasets in the repository. The message is clearly getting through.

Sustainability

The word sustainability (particularly in the scholarly communication world) is code for ‘money’. And money has become quite a sticking point in the area of data management. The way Cambridge started the Research Data Facility was by employing a single person, Dr Marta Teperek for one year, supported by the remnants of the RCUK Transition Fund. It became quickly obvious that we needed more staff to manage the workload and now the Facility employs half an Events and Outreach Coordinator and half a Repository Manager plus a Research Data Adviser who looks after the bulk of the uploading of data sets into the repository.

Clearly there was a need to work out the longer term support for staffing the Facility – a service for which there are no signs of demand slowing. Early last year we started scouting around for options.  In April 2013 the RCUK released some guidance that said it was permissible to recover costs from grants through direct charges or overheads – but noted institutions could not charge twice. This guidance also mentioned that it was permissible for institutions to recover costs of RDM Facilities as other Small Research Facilities, “provided that such facilities are transparently charged to all projects that use them”.

Transparency

On the basis of that advice we established a Research Data Facility as a Small Research Facility according to the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) methodology. Our proposal was that Facility’s costs will be recovered from grants as directly allocated costs. We chose this option rather than overheads because of the advantage of transparency to the funder of our activities. By charging grants this way it meant a bigger advocacy and education role for the Facility. But the advantage is that it would make researchers aware that they need to consider research data management seriously, that this involves both time and money, and that it is an integral part of a grant proposal.

Dr Danny Kingsley has argued before (for example in a paper ‘Paying for publication: issues and challenges for research support services‘) that by centralising payments for article processing charges, the researchers remain ignorant of the true economics of the open access system in the way that they are generally unaware of the amounts spent on subscriptions. If we charged the costs of the Facility into overheads, it becomes yet another hidden cost and another service that ‘magically’ happens behind the scenes from the researcher’s point of view.

In terms of the actual numbers, direct costs of the Research Data Facility included salaries for 3.2 FTEs (a Research Data Facility Manager, Research Data Adviser, 0.5 Outreach and Engagement Coordinator, 0.5 Repository Manager, 0.2 Senior Management time), hardware and hardware maintenance costs, software licences, costs of organising events as well as the costs of staff training and conference attendance. The total direct annual cost of our Facility was less than £200,000. These are the people cost of the Facility and are not to be confused with the repository costs (for which we do charge directly).

Determining how much to charge

Throughout this process we have explored many options for trying to assess a way of graduating the costing in relation to what support might be required. Ideally, we would want to ensure that the Facility costs can be accurately measured based on what the applicant indicated in their data management plan. However, not all funders require data management plans. Additionally, while data management plans provide some indication of the quantity of data (storage) to be generated, they do not allow a direct estimate of the amount of data management assistance required during the lifetime of the grant. Because we could not assess the level of support required for a particular research project from a data management plan, we looked at an alternative charging strategy.

We investigated charging according to the number of people on a team, given that the training component of the Facility is measurable by attendees to workshops. However, after investigation we were unable to easily extract that type of information about grants and this also created a problem for charging for collaborative grants. We then looked at charging a small flat charge on every grant requiring the assistance of the Facility and at charging proportionally to the size (percentage of value) of the grant. Since we did not have any compelling evidence that bigger grants require more Facility assistance, we proposed a model of flat charging on all grants, which require Facility assistance. This model was also the most cost-effective from an administrative point of view.

As an indicator of the amount of work involved in the development of the Business Case, and the level of work and input that we have received relating to it, the document is now up to version 18 – each version representing a recalculation of the costings.

Collaborative process

A proposal such as we were suggesting – that we charge the costs of the Facility as a direct charge against grants – is reasonably radical. It was important that we ensure the charges would be seen as fair and reasonable by the research community and the funders. To that end we have spent the best part of a year in conversation with both communities.

Within the University we had useful feedback from the Open Access Project Board (OAPB) when we first discussed the option in July last year. We are also grateful to the members of our community who subsequently met with us in one on one meetings to discuss the merits of the Facility and the options for supporting it. At the November 2015 OAPB meeting, we presented a mature Business Case. We have also had to clear the Business Case through meetings of the Resource Management Committee (RMC).

Clearly we needed to ensure that our funders were prepared to support our proposal. Once we were in a position to share a Business Case with the funders we started a series of meetings and conversations with them.

The Wellcome Trust was immediate in its response – they would not allow direct charging to grants as they consider this to be an overhead cost, which they do not pay. We met with Cancer Research UK (CRUK) in January 2016 and there was a positive response about our transparent approach to costing and the comprehensiveness of services that the Facility provides to researchers at Cambridge. These issues are now being discussed with senior management at CRUK and discussions with CRUK are still ongoing at the time of writing this report (May 2016). [Update 24 May: CRUK agreed to consider research data management costs as direct costs on grant applications on a case by case basis, if justified appropriately in the context of the proposed research].

We encourage open dialogue with the RCUK funders about data management. In May 2015 we invited Ben Ryan to come to the University to talk about the EPSRC expectations on data management and how Cambridge meets these requirements. In August 2015 Michael Ball from the BBSRC came to talk to our community. We had an indication from the RCUK that our proposal was reasonable in principle. Once we were in a position to show our Business Case to the RCUK we invited Mark Thorley to discuss the issue and he has been in discussion with the individual councils for their input to give us a final answer.

Administrative issues

Timing in a decision like this is challenging because of the large number of systems within the institution that would be affected if a change were to occur. In anticipation of a positive response we started the process of ensuring our management and financial systems were prepared and able to manage the costing into grants – to ensure that if a green light were given we would be prepared.  To that end we have held many discussions with the Research Office on the practicalities of building the costing into our systems to make sure the charge is easy to add in our grant costing tool. We also had numerous discussions on how to embed these procedures in their workflows for validating whether the Facility services are needed and what to do if researchers forget to add them. The development has now been done.

A second consideration is the necessity to ensure all of the administrative staff involved in managing research grants (at Cambridge this is a  group of over 100 people) are aware of the change and how to manage both the change to the grant management system and also manage the questions from their research community. Simultaneously we were also involved in numerous discussions with our invaluable TRAC team at the Finance Division at the University who helped us validate all the Facility costs (to ensure that none of the costs are charged twice) and establishing costs centres and workflows for recovering money from grants.

Meanwhile we have had to keep our Facility staff on temporary contracts until we are in a position to advertise the roles. There is a huge opportunity cost in training people up in this area.

Conclusion

As it happened, the RCUK has come back to us to say that we can charge this cost to grants but as an overhead rather than direct cost. Having this decision means we can advertise the positions and secure our staffing situation. But we won’t be needing the administrative amendments to the system, nor the advocacy programme.

It has been a long process given we began preparing the Business Case in March 2015. The consultation throughout the University and the engagement of our community (both research and funder) has given us an opportunity to discuss the issues of research data management more widely. It is a shame – from our perspective – that we will not be able to be transparent about the costs of managing data effectively.

The funders and the University are all working towards a shared goal – we are wanting a culture change towards more open research, including the sharing of research data. To achieve this we need a more aware and engaged research community on these matters.  There is much advocacy to do.

Published 8 May 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley and Dr Marta Teperek
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‘It is all a bit of a mess’ – observations from Researcher to Reader conference

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“It is all a bit of a mess. It used to be simple. Now it is complicated.” This was the conclusion of Mark Carden, the coordinator of the Researcher to Reader conference after two days of discussion, debate and workshops about scholarly publication..

The conference bills itself as: ‘The premier forum for discussion of the international scholarly content supply chain – bringing knowledge from the Researcher to the Reader.’ It was unusual because it mixed ‘tribes’ who usually go to separate conferences. Publishers made up 47% of the group, Libraries were next with 17%, Technology 14%, Distributors were 9% and there were a small number of academics and others.

In addition to talks and panel discussions there were workshop groups that used the format of smaller groups that met three times and were asked to come up with proposals. In order to keep this blog to a manageable length it does not include the discussions from the workshops.

The talks were filmed and will be available. There was also a very active Twitter discussion at #R2RConf.  This blog is my attempt to summarise the points that emerged from the conference.

Suggestions, ideas and salient points that came up

  • Journals are dead – the publishing future is the platform
  • Journals are not dead – but we don’t need issues any more as they are entirely redundant in an online environment
  • Publishing in a journal benefits the author not the reader
  • Dissemination is no longer the value added offered by publishers. Anyone can have a blog. The value-add is branding
  • The drivers for choosing research areas are what has been recently published, not what is needed by society
  • All research is generated from what was published the year before – and we can prove it
  • Why don’t we disaggregate the APC model and charge for sections of the service separately?
  • You need to provide good service to the free users if you want to build a premium product
  • The most valuable commodity as an editor is your reviewer time
  • Peer review is inconsistent and systematically biased.
  • The greater the novelty of the work the greater likelihood it is to have a negative review
  • Poor academic writing is rewarded

Life After the Death of Science Journals – How the article is the future of scholarly communication

Vitek Tracz, the Chairman of the Science Navigation Group which produces the F1000Research series of publishing platforms was the keynote speaker. He argued that we are coming to the end of journals. One of the issues with journals is that the essence of journals is selection. The referee system is secret – the editors won’t usually tell the author who the referee is because the referee is working for the editor not the author. The main task of peer review is to accept or reject the work – there may be some idea to improve the paper. But that decision is not taken by the referees, but by the editor who has the Impact Factor to consider.

This system allows for information to be published that should not be published – eventually all publications will find somewhere to publish. Even in high level journals many papers cannot be replicated. A survey by PubMed found there was no correlation between impact factor and likelihood of an abstract being looked at on PubMed.

Readers can now get papers they want by themselves and create their own collections that interest them. But authors need journals because IF is so deeply embedded. Placement in a prestigious journal doesn’t increase readership, but it does increase likelihood of getting tenure. So authors need journals, readers don’t.

Vitek noted F1000Research “are not publishers – because we do not own any titles and don’t want to”. Instead they offer tools and services. It is not publishing in the traditional sense because there is no decision to publish or not publish something – that process is completely driven by authors. He predicted this will be the future of science publishing will shift from journals to services (there will be more tools & publishing directly on funder platforms).

In response to a question about impact factor and author motivation change, Vitek said “the only way of stopping impact factors as a thing is to bring the end of journals”. This aligns with the conclusions in a paper I co-authored some years ago. ‘The publishing imperative: the pervasive influence of publication metrics’

Author Behaviours

Vicky Williams, the CEO of research communications company Research Media discussed “Maximising the visibility and impact of research” and talked abut the need to translate complex ideas in research into understandable language.

She noted that the public does want to engage with research. A large percentage of public want to know about research while it is happening. However they see communication about research is poor. There is low trust in science journalism.

Vicki noted the different funding drivers – now funding is very heavily distributed. Research institutions have to look at alternative funding options. Now we have students as consumers – they are mobile and create demand. Traditional content formats are being challenged.

As a result institutions are needing to compete for talent. They need to build relationships with industry – and promotion is a way of achieving that. Most universities have a strong emphasis on outreach and engagement.

This means we need a different language, different tone and a different medium. However academic outputs are written for other academics. Most research is impenetrable for other audiences. This has long been a bugbear of mine (see ‘Express yourself scientists, speaking plainly isn’t beneath you’).

Vicki outlined some steps to showcase research – having a communications plan, network with colleagues, create a lay summary, use visual aids, engage. She argued that this acts as a research CV.

Rick Anderson, the Associate Dean of the University of Utah talked about the Deeply Weird Ecosystem of publishing. Rick noted that publication is deeply weird, with many different players – authors (send papers out), publishers (send out publications), readers (demand subscriptions), libraries (subscribe or cancel). All players send signals out into the school communications ecosystem, when we send signals out we get partial and distorted signals back.

An example is that publishers set prices without knowing the value of the content. The content they control is unique – there are no substitutable products.

He also noted there is a growing provenance of funding with strings. Now funders are imposing conditions on how you want to publish it not just the narrative of the research but the underlying data. In addition the institution you work for might have rules about how to publish in particular ways.

Rick urged authors answer the question ‘what is my main reason for publishing’ – not for writing. In reality it is primarily to have high impact publishing. By choosing to publish in a particular journal an author is casting a vote for their future. ‘Who has power over my future – do they care about where I publish? I should take notice of that’. He said that ‘If publish with Elsevier I turn control over to them, publishing in PLOS turns control over to the world’.

Rick mentioned some journal selection tools. JANE is a system (oriented to biological sciences) where authors can plug in abstract to a search box and it analyses the language and comes up with suggested list of journals. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) member list provides a ‘white list’ of publishers. Journal Guide helps researchers select an appropriate journal for publication.

A tweet noted that “Librarians and researchers are overwhelmed by the range of tools available – we need a curator to help pick out the best”.

Peer review

Alice Ellingham who is Director of Editorial Office Ltd which runs online journal editorial services for publishers and societies discussed ‘Why peer review can never be free (even if your paper is perfect)’. Alice discussed the different processes associated with securing and chasing peer review.

She said the unseen cost of peer review is communication, when they are providing assistance to all participants. She estimated that per submission it takes about 45-50 minutes per paper to manage the peer review. 

Editorial Office tasks include looking for scope of a paper, the submission policy, checking ethics, checking declarations like competing interests and funding requests. Then they organise the review, assist the editors to make a decision, do the copy editing and technical editing.

Alice used an animal analogy – the cheetah representing the speed of peer review that authors would like to see, but a tortoise represented what they experience. This was very interesting given the Nature news piece that was published on 10 February “Does it take too long to publish research?”

Will Frass is a Research Executive at Taylor & Francis and discussed the findings of a T&F study “Peer review in 2015 – A global view”. This is a substantial report and I won’t be able to do his talk justice here, there is some information about the report here, and a news report about it here.

One of the comments that struck me was that researchers in the sciences are generally more comfortable with single blind review than in the humanities. Will noted that because there are small niches in STM, double blind often becomes single blind anyway as they all know each other.

A question from the floor was that reviewers spend eight hours on a paper and their time is more important than publishers’. The question was asking what publishers can do to support peer review? While this was not really answered on the floor* it did cause a bit of a flurry on Twitter with a discussion about whether the time spent is indeed five hours or eight hours – quoting different studies.

*As a general observation, given that half of the participants at the conference were publishers, they were very underrepresented in the comment and discussion. This included the numerous times when a query or challenge was put out to the publishers in the room. As someone who works collaboratively and openly, this was somewhat frustrating.

The Sociology of Research

Professor James Evans, who is a sociologist looking at the science of science at the University of Chicago spoke about How research scientists actually behave as individuals and in groups.

His work focuses on the idea of using data from the publication process that tell rich stories into the process of science. James spoke about some recent research results relating to the reading and writing of science including peer reviews and the publication of science, research and rewarding science.

James compared the effect of writing styles to see what is effective in terms of reward (citations). He pitted ‘clarity’ – using few words and sentences, the present tense, and maintaining the message on point against ‘promotion’ – where the author claims novelty, uses superlatives and active words.

The research found writing with clarity is associated with fewer citations and writing in promotional style is associated with greater citations. So redundancy and length of clauses and mixed metaphors end up enhancing a paper’s search ability. This harks back to the conversation about poor academic writing the day before – bad writing is rewarded.

Scientists write to influence reviewers and editors in the process. Scientists strategically understand the class of people who will review their work and know they will be flattered when they see their own research. They use strategic citation practices.

James noted that even though peer review is the gold standard for evaluating the scientific record. In terms of determining the importance or significance of scientific works his research shows peer review is inconsistent and systematically biased. The greater the reviewer distance results in more positive reviews. This is possibly because if a person is reviewing work close to their speciality, they can see all the criticism. The greater the novelty of the work the greater likelihood it is to have a negative review. It is possible to ‘game’ this by driving the peer review panels. James expressed his dislike of the institution of suggesting reviewers. These provide more positive, influential and worse reviews (according to the editors).

Scientists understand the novelty bias so they downplay the new elements to the old elements. James discussed Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the ‘essential tension’ between the classes of ‘career considerations’ – which result in job security, publication, tenure (following the crowd) and ‘fame’ – which results in Nature papers, and hopefully a Nobel Prize.

This is a challenge because the optimal question for science becomes a problem for the optimal question for a scientific career. We are sacrificing pursuing a diffuse range of research areas for hubs of research areas because of the career issue.

The centre of the research cycle is publication rather than the ‘problems in the world’ that need addressing. Publications bear the seeds of discovery and represent how science as a system thinks. Data from the publication process can be used to tune, critique and reimagine that process.

James demonstrated his research that clearly shows that research today is driven by last year’s publications. Literally. The work takes a given paper and extracts the authors, the diseases, the chemicals etc and then uses a ‘random walk’ program. The result ends up predicting 95% of the combinations of authors and diseases and chemicals in the following year.

However scientists think they are getting their ideas, the actual origin is traceable in the literature. This means that research directions are not driven by global or local health needs for example.

Panel: Show me the Money

I sat on this panel discussion about ‘The financial implications of open access for researchers, intermediaries and readers’ which made it challenging to take notes (!) but two things that struck me in the discussions were:

Rick Andersen suggested that when people talk about ‘percentages’ in terms of research budgets they don’t want you to think about the absolute number, noting that 1% of Wellcome Trust research budget is $7 million and 1% of the NIH research budget is $350 million.

Toby Green, the Head of Publishing for the OECD put out a challenge to the publishers in the audience. He noted that airlines have split up the cost of travel into different components (you pay for food or luggage etc, or can choose not to), and suggested that publishers split APCs to pay for different aspects of the service they offer and allow people to choose different elements. The OECD has moved to a Freemium model where that the payment comes from a small number of premium users – that funds the free side.

As – rather depressingly – is common in these kinds of discussions, the general feeling was that open access is all about compliance and is too expensive. While I am on the record as saying that the way the UK is approaching open access is not financially sustainable, I do tire of the ‘open access is code for compliance’ conversation. This is one of the unexpected consequences of the current UK open access policy landscape. I was forced to yet again remind the group that open access is not about compliance, it is about providing public access to publicly funded research so people who are not in well resourced institutions can also see this research.

Research in Institutions

Graham Stone, the Information Resources Manager, University of Huddersfield talked about work he has done on the life cycle of open access for publishers, researchers and libraries. His slides are available.

Graham discussed how to get open access to work to our advantage, saying we need to get it embedded. OAWAL is trying to get librarians who have had nothing to do with OA into OA.

Graham talked the group through the UK Open Access Life Cycle which maps the research lifecycle for librarians and repository managers, research managers, fo authors (who think magic happens) and publishers.

My talk was titled ‘Getting an Octopus into a String Bag’. This discussed the complexity of communicating with the research community across a higher education institution. The slides are available.

The talk discussed the complex policy landscape, the tribal nature of the academic community, the complexity of the structure in Cambridge and then looked at some of the ways we are trying to reach out to our community.

While there was nothing really new from my perspective – it is well known in research management circles that communicating with the research community – as an independent and autonomous group – is challenging. This is of course further complicated by the structure of Cambridge. But in preliminary discussions about the conference, Mark Carden, the conference organiser, assured me that this would be news to the large number of publishers and others who are not in a higher education institution in the audience.

Summary: What does everybody want?

Mark Carden summarised the conference by talking about the different things different stakeholder in the publishing game want.

Researchers/Authors – mostly they want to be left alone to get on with their research. They want to get promoted and get tenure. They don’t want to follow rules.

Readers – want content to be free or cheap (or really expensive as long as something else is paying). Authors (who are readers) do care about the journals being cancelled if it is one they are published in. They want a nice clear easy interface because they are accessing research on different publisher’s webpages. They don’t think about ‘you get what you pay for.’

Institutions – don’t want to be in trouble with the regulators, want to look good in league tables, don’t want to get into arguments with faculty, don’t want to spend any money on this stuff.

Libraries – Hark back to the good old days. They wanted manageable journal subscriptions, wanted free stuff, expensive subscriptions that justified ERM. Now libraries are reaching out for new roles and asking should we be publishers, or taking over the Office of Research, or a repository or managing APCs?

Politicians – want free public access to publicly funded research. They love free stuff to give away (especially other people’s free stuff).

Funders – want to be confusing, want to be bossy or directive. They want to mandate the output medium and mandate copyright rules. They want possibly to become publishers. Mark noted there are some state controlled issues here.

Publishers – “want to give huge piles of cash to their shareholders and want to be evil” (a joke). Want to keep their business model – there is a conservatism in there. They like to be able to pay their staff. Publishers would like to realise their brand value, attract paying subscribers, and go on doing most of the things they do. They want to avoid Freemium. Publishers could be a platform or a mega journal. They should focus on articles and forget about issues and embrace continuous publishing. They need to manage versioning.

Reviewers – apparently want to do less copy editing, but this is a lot of what they do. Reviewers are conflicted. They want openness and anonymity, slick processes and flexibility, fast turnaround and lax timetables. Mark noted that while reviewers want credit or points or money or something, you would need to pay peer reviewers a lot for it to be worthwhile.

Conference organisers – want the debate to continue. They need publishers and suppliers to stay in business.

Published 18 February 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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In conversation with Wellcome Trust and CRUK

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On Friday 22 January Cambridge University 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 came to the University to talk to our researchers.

The related blog ‘Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing‘ summarises the presentations Jamie and David gave. After this event, a group of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences and from the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge were invited to ask questions about the Wellcome Trust data management and sharing policy and CRUK data sharing and preservation policy directly of David and Jamie.

This blog is a summary of the discussion, with questions thematically grouped. These questions will be added to the list of Frequently Asked Questions on the University’s Research Data Management Website.

In summary:

  • It is not recommended that researchers simply share a link and release the data when requested. Research data should be available, accessible and discoverable.
  • The first responsibility is to protect the study participants. The funders provide guidance documents on sharing of patient data. Ethics committees also provide advice and guidance on what data can be shared. In principle, patient data should be safeguarded, but this should not preclude sharing. There are models for managed access to data that allow personal/sensitive data to be shared for legitimate purposes in a safe and secure manner.
  • The funders do not want to prevent new collaborations. When sharing data they recommend data generators provide a statement in the description of the data that they are willing to collaborate
  • It is recognised that it is often appropriate for researchers to have a defined period of exclusive access to the data they generate, but this should be determined by disciplinary norms. Any exemptions or delays have to be justified on a case by case basis, ideally at the outset of the project.
  • The funders expect research data that supports publications to be made accessible and publications should have a clear statement explaining how to access the underlying research data.
  • However researchers need to decide what is useful to be shared considering the effort of preparing the data for deposit and of sharing the data. If nobody is going to use the data, sharing is not a good use of researcher’s time.
  • Discipline-specific data repositories, where these exist, are recommended preferentially over general purpose or institutional repositories
  • Biosharing is an excellent resource with references to discipline-specific metadata schemas.
  • Staff members whose role is to manage data is an eligible cost on a grant
  • There are no funds for sharing data from old projects, although there are exceptions on a case by case basis
  • The funders are considering monitoring data management plans but their current primary goal is to encourage people to think about data management and sharing from the very start of the project

Access to research data

Q: Are funders benefiting from the expertise of organisations such as UK Data Service when providing advice on data access? UK Data Service has been managing controlled access to research data for a long time and it would be advantageous to benefit from their expertise.

A: Yes, we are in discussion with the UK Data Service. We are also working with the UK Data Service to consider whether it might be appropriate for hosting data from other disciplines beyond social science. We also believe there is significant scope to share lessons and best practices for data sharing between the social and biomedical sciences.

Q: Could we just share research data only when asked for it?

A: This is not a recommended solution: research data should be available, accessible and discoverable. Data access controls and criteria for what needs to happen for the access to be granted have to be made clear in metadata description.

Q: I have patient data which has to be stored in a secure space. I always say in my data management plan that I cannot share my data. I would like to get ethical guidance which will explain to me how to share these data. It is very easy to say that data cannot be shared. I would like to share my data, but I would like to do it properly. With patient data it is extremely difficult, especially with genomics data, where there is a risk that patients can be identified.

A: Sharing of clinical data is not easy. Both Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK are helping to drive a great deal of work which is considering access and governance models through which sensitive patient data can be made available for research in a safe, secure and trusted manner. They provide guidance documents on sharing of patient data. Safety of patients and patients’ data is important. Ethics committees also provide advice and guidance on what data can be shared.

Q: What about sharing of physical materials? I have received a request to share a culture derived from a patient material, but the Ethics Committee did not approve sharing of this material. What shall I do?

A (Peter Hedges, Head of Research Office): If your ethical approval says that you cannot share that material, you cannot share it. Your first responsibility is to protect your study participants.

Q: If I share my data via a repository and people can simply download my data, I can no longer collaborate with them to work on the data and I have lost the possibility of getting credit for my data.

A: Nobody wants to prevent new collaborations from happening. A solution might be to add a statement that you are willing to collaborate in the description of your data. Your data requestor might be interested in collaborating, simply because you know your data the best. Funders also expect that the data re-used by others is appropriately acknowledged/cited, and they want to ensure that due credit results from the secondary use of data.

Quality control of research data

Q: If researchers start sharing unpublished research data via data repositories there is a risk that these data will not be of good quality as they will not be peer-reviewed.

A: Authors of unpublished data can simply state in the data description that the item was not peer-reviewed. If applicable, funders also encourage reciprocal links between publications and supporting research data.

What data needs to be shared and when?

Q: If researchers start to share everything there will be a lot of useless data available in data repositories. How to prevent a flood of useless data on the internet?

A: We would like researchers to decide what data is useful to be shared. If nobody is likely to use the data, sharing is not a good use of researcher’s time. Repositories also need to make decisions over what is worth keeping over time.

Comment (Peter Hedges, Head of Research Office): The Research Council UK focuses on research data supporting publications and this is what we recommend to researchers: share research data which underpins publications.

Q: Are we expected to share large datasets resulting from bigger projects (databases, long-term datasets) or data supporting individual publications?

A: We expect research data that supports individual publications to be made available with a hyperlink to the data. We also want researchers to consider and plan more broadly how they can make data assets of value resulting from our funded research available to others in a timely and appropriate manner.

Q: What about images? Is it useful to share them? It involves a lot of time to organise images. Besides, a single confocal picture with multiple layers is 1GB. In theory it is possible to share all raw data and all raw images, but who would want to look at them? 10 figures of 10 images is already 100 GB of data. Where would I store all these images, who is going to use these data and how am I going to pay for this?

A: The effort of preparing the data for deposit and of sharing the data should be proportionate to the potential benefits of data sharing. Researchers need to decide what is useful to be shared, following disciplinary best practices and norms (recognising that disciplines are in very different places in terms of defining these).

Q: Is there a set amount of time for exclusive use of research data?

A: Researchers should adhere to disciplinary norms. For example, in genomics research data is frequently shared before publication (sometimes under a publication moratorium which protects the data generator’s right to first publication). Any exemptions or delays have to be justified on a case by case basis.

Comment (Peter Hedges, Head of Research Office): Research is competitive. Sometimes it might be useful for researchers to know who wants to get the access to data and what do they need them for.

Cost of data sharing

Q: Can I ask in my grant for a staff member to help me with data management?

A: Yes, this is an eligible cost on grant applications: you can request a salary to support a research data manager for your research project, as long as it is justified.

Q: According to CRUK policy, costs for data sharing can be budgeted in grant applications only from August 2015. What about research data from older projects, when these costs were not eligible in grant applications? Is there any transition fund available to pay for this?

A: Unfortunately, there are no additional funds to pay for these costs. Researchers who have older datasets that might be of significant value to the community should contact CRUK – all requests for support will be considered on a case by case basis.

Q: Wellcome Trust encourages data sharing and data re-use, but does not allow for costs of long-term data preservation to be budgeted in grant applications. This does not make sense to me.

A: We are still reviewing our policy on costs of data management and sharing and we might be revisiting this issue – however, it is problematic for us to consider estimated costs for preservation that extend before the life-time of the grant. Our understanding is that costs of long-term data preservation are often less significant than costs of initial data ingestion by the repository (and we will cover ingestion costs).

Q: Who is then going to pay for the long-term data storage?

A: Wellcome Trust funds some discipline-specific repositories, but this is done jointly with other funders. We support bigger undertakings and we are also working with partners to develop platforms for data sharing and discoverability in some priority areas (notably clinical trials). Cancer Research UK pays for some long-term storage options, if these are justified for particular needs of the project. These decisions are made on a case by case basis, depending on how the costs are justified and whether these are directly related to the scientific value of the project.

Metadata standards

Q: At the moment there are many general purpose and institutional repositories, which are not well structured. To support efficient re-use of data it is important to use structured data repositories and adhere to metadata standards. What are funders’ opinions about this?

A: Wherever possible, discipline-specific data repositories should be used preferentially over general purpose or institutional repositories. Adherence to discipline-specific metadata standards is also encouraged. It has to be acknowledged that development of well-structured data repositories is very resource-intensive and not all disciplines have good quality repositories to support them. For example, it took over 30 years to adapt unified metadata standards at Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. The time need to properly solve problems should never be underestimated.

Q: Are funders planning to provide researchers with a list of recommended schemas for metadata?

A: Biosharing is an excellent resource with references to discipline-specific metadata schemas. It is a useful suggestion to include a reference to Biosharing on our website.

Policy implementation

Q: Are you planning to monitor researchers’ adherence to data management plans? For example, the BBSRC does not have the manpower to check all data management plans manually, but they are planning to create a system to check if data has been uploaded automatically.

A: We are considering this. At the moment we require data management plans with the primary goal to encourage people to think about data management and sharing from the very start of the project.

Published 5 February 2016
Written by Dr Marta Teperek, verified by David Carr and Jamie Enoch
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