Tag Archives: open data

Open Research in the Humanities: CORE Data

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Authors: Emma Gilby, Matthias Ammon, Rachel Leow and Sam Moore

This is the third of a series of blog posts, presenting the reflections of the Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. Read the opening post at this link. The working group aimed to reframe open research in a way that was more meaningful to humanities disciplines, and their work will inform the University of Cambridge approach to open research. This post reflects on the concept of FAIR data and proposes an alternative way of thinking about data in the humanities.

As a rule, data in the arts and humanities is collected, organised, recontextualised and explained. We are therefore putting forward this acronym as an alternative to LERU’s FAIR data (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). Our data is collected rather than generated; organised and recontextualised in order to further a cultural conversation about discoveries, methods and debates; and explained as part of the analytical process. Any view of scholarly comms as uniquely about the distribution of and access to FAIR data (‘from my bench to yours’) will seem less relevant to A&H academics. Similarly, the goal of reproducibility of data – in the sense in which this often appears in the sciences and social sciences, where it refers to the results of a study being perfectly replicable when the study is repeated – is, if anything, contrary to the aim of CORE data: i.e. the aim that this data should be built upon and thereby modified through the process of further recontextualization. Our CORE data, then, understood as information used for reference and analysis, is made up of texts, music, pictures, fabrics, objects, installations, performances, etc. Sometimes, this information does not belong to us, but is owned by another person or institution or community, in which case it is not ours to make public.

Opportunities

The A&H tend to bring information together in new ways to further discussion about socio-cultural developments across the globe. Available digital data is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the material that is worked with.[1] Arts and humanities scholars, who spend their lives thinking about the arrangement and communication of information, are acutely aware that archives (digital and otherwise) are not neutral spaces, but man-made and the product of human choices. This means that information available online, to a broadband-enabled public, is asymmetrical and distorted.

One of the main benefits of open research is that it is thought to make data globally accessible, especially to ‘the global south’ and to institutions with fewer available funds to ‘buy data in’. As we explore below (‘research integrity’), this unidirectional view of open access is problematic. In general, digital material tends to reproduce English-speaking structures and epistemologies. As FAIR data is redefined as CORE data, an attention to context will hopefully promote the diverse positions occupied by all those who make up the world and who produce research about it.

Support required

In order usefully to employ CORE data in the A&H, we need to bring to the surface and examine underlying assumptions about knowledge creation as well as knowledge dissemination.

The work of the digital humanities – rooted explicitly in digital technologies and the forms of communication that they enable – is obviously a vital part of these discussions about opening up the CORE data of the humanities. Digital work, in the same way as any other successful A&H research, needs to consider its own materiality and conditions of production, evaluate its own history, draw attention to its own limits, and navigate its trans-temporal relationships with data in other forms (the manuscript, the printed text, the painting, the piece of music). This is a developing field and one that still has an uneasy relationship with the existing tenure/promotions system.[2] Colleagues noted that training needs are evolving constantly. It is often hard to know where to turn for specific guidance in e.g. how to manage one’s own ‘born digital’ archives, how to deconstruct a twitter archive, and so on.

This issue also overlaps with the need, as part of the ‘rewards and incentives’ process outlined below, to evaluate the success of colleagues as they undertake this training and negotiate with these processes. DH is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of research and needs to be widely resourced. But it would also be harmful to collapse all A&H research into ‘the digital humanities’. The work of colleagues whose CORE data is resistant, for whatever reason, to wide online dissemination in English also needs to be allocated the value it deserves: some publics are simply smaller than others.

Postscript: the group subsequently became aware of the CARE Principles of Indigenous Data Governance. These principles will also be considered when developing our services in support of data management and ethical sharing.

[1] Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, ‘The Risk of Losing the Thick Description: Data Management Challenges Faced by the Arts and Humanities in the Evolving FAIR Data Ecosystem’, in Digital Technologies and the Practices of Humanities Research, edited by Jennifer Edmond (Open Book Publishers, 2014), https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0192.10

[2]See the excellent article by Cait Coker and Kate Ozment ‘Building the Women in Book History Bibliography, or Digital Enumerative Bibliography as Preservation of Feminist Labor’, Digital Humanities Quarterly 13 (3), 2019, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/3/000428/000428.html – where the authors of the ‘Women in Book History’ digital bibliography still see the tenure system as ‘monograph-driven’, and had to fund their research through selling merchandise.

Open Research at Cambridge Conference – Opening session

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The Open Research at Cambridge conference took place between 22–26 November 2021. In a series of talks, panel discussions and interactive Q&A sessions, researchers, publishers, and other stakeholders explored how Cambridge can make the most of the opportunities offered by open research. This blog is part of a series summarising each event. 

The opening session, chaired by Dr Jessica Gardner (University Librarian and Director of Library Services) included talks by Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith (Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research), Professor Steve Russell (Acting Head of Department of Genetics and Chair of Open Research Steering Committee), Mandy Hill (Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press) and Dr Neal Spencer (Deputy Director for Collections and Research at the Fitzwilliam Museum). All four speakers foresee an increasingly open future, with benefits for both institutions and researchers. They also considered some of the challenges that still need to be worked through to avoid potential problems.

What is working well?

In recent years, we have made great progress in the proportion of publications that are open access. Over three quarters of publications with Cambridge authors last year were openly available in some form.

The trend is continuing and it is not unique to our institution. CUP have set an ambitious goal for the vast majority of research articles they publish to be open access by 2025.

Other forms of publication are becoming common, meeting different dissemination needs. Preprints have been the star of the show during the pandemic, allowing rapid dissemination while formal peer review follows down the line.

Diagram from Mandy Hill’s slide: ‘Increasingly open platforms and formal publishing will meet different dissemination needs’

In the scholarly communication arena, open access articles benefit from more downloads and citations. Museum-based projects involving artisans, schools and artists all found enthusiastic responses.

What can we look forward to?

Research culture is coming under the spotlight across the sector, and Cambridge has committed to an ambitious action plan to create a thriving environment to do research. Key principles include openness, collaboration, inclusivity, and fair recognition of all contributions.

Diagram from Prof Steve Russell: ‘Going Forward’

Implementing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is part of this progress. We want to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of journal or publisher metrics. This also means recognising all research outputs and a broad range of impacts.

Reproducibility is increasingly recognised as critical in a number of disciplines. A developing UKRN group within the University aims to ‘take nobody’s word for it’ – but rather support reproducible workflows that underpin confidence in the conclusions of research. By sharing and rewarding best practice we can become world leaders in this area, and in open research more widely.

In the past, museum collections have tended to be documented in limited ways, with poor accessibility and interoperability, which made it hard to discover and use materials. Several exciting projects at the Fitzwilliam Museum and more broadly have started to change that. There are opportunities for a single discovery portal, tying together different collections. The Fitzwilliam Museum is also making its collection discovery process richer, by providing opportunities for deeper dives, and more connected, by linking with other collections and resources.

Deep zoom access to an image in the Fitzwilliam collection. Adapted from Dr Neal Spencer’s slide ‘Fitzwilliam Museum Collections Search’.

What problems should we be mindful of?

There are still barriers that hinder some open research aspirations. Historical constraints on the ways we find materials, conduct research, and publish results remain. Some systems may need to be reimagined, while not scrapping structures that are still serving us well.

Cambridge is a large and complex institution, where change takes time. Nevertheless, there is an established governance structures and an evolving set of policies that support open research.

Most importantly, researchers should be at the centre of the move towards open research. It is important that they benefit from open practices, rather than finding themselves torn between competing priorities. Conversations continued throughout the week to explore possible approaches in different disciplines, drawing from the rich diversity of experiences to shape the future of open research at Cambridge.

Open Data Sharing and reuse

Open Research at Cambridge Conference

The Open Research at Cambridge conference took place between 22–26 November 2021. In a series of talks, panel discussions and interactive Q&A sessions, researchers, publishers, and other stakeholders explored how Cambridge can make the most of the opportunities offered by open research. This blog is part of a series summarising each event. 

The session described here was on ‘Open data sharing and reuse’ and is summarised by the session chairs, Dominic Dixon (Research Librarian) and Dr Sacha Jones (Research Data Manager) at the Office of Scholarly Communication, Cambridge University Libraries.

The recording of the event can be found here:

Have you wondered how research data is used after it has been shared publicly as open data? What are some of the impacts of sharing data and of its subsequent reuse by others? Are there ethical factors to consider? Does the researcher or research group who shared their data openly benefit in any way from its reuse? What are the essential properties of a reusable dataset? This session on ‘Open data sharing and reuse’ explored these questions and more via presentations delivered by a panel of University of Cambridge researchers from various fields. They included: Professor Richard (Rik) Henson, Deputy Director of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Psychiatry and President of the British Neuroscience Association; Professor John Suckling, Director of Research in Psychiatric Neuroimaging in the Department of Psychiatry and chair of the University of Cambridge Research Ethics Committee; Dr Mihály Fazekas, Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Policy, Central European University, and scientific director of an innovative think-tank at the Government Transparency Institute; and Professor Simon Deakin, Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law and Director of the Centre for Business Research.

All speakers discussed challenges and concerns around data sharing, including how and when to share. Rik asks, “Why wait until publication?” to share research data, and perhaps consider publishing a data paper where a dataset is celebrated in its own right, without the narrative of a traditional article. Researchers are often concerned about scooping but there’s little evidence of this and it may be a “paper tiger”. There’s an additional fear that data sharing will expose errors in work but as Rik noted, “I think we just need to get over our egos and accept that everyone makes errors”. One particular challenge can be to control what people (or bots) do with your data, but researchers have a choice over where to share (e.g., which repository to choose) and how to license their data. Something that was implicit in all talks, and stated explicitly by Simon, is that the benefits of sharing data openly vastly outweigh the costs.

Sharing data deriving from research involving human participants is understandably complex due to data protection regulations (e.g., GDPR), obtaining informed consent, and the challenge of anonymising datasets, particularly those containing qualitative data. Participants need to be informed about how their data will be used, so the message is that data sharing needs to be planned far in advance, even at the gestation of the project idea. It is important to be aware of the repository options; for example, if managed/controlled access to data is required then hear about the set-up at MRC CBU discussed by Rik, or the UK Data Service for sensitive qualitative data, as highlighted by Simon. John discusses the import and export of datasets from an ethical perspective, giving two examples from the biomedical and social sciences with a focus on secondary data use. He says that these examples illustrate just how far in the future you might need to think when considering how your data might be reused by others: it is “a lot better to ask for permission from all the stakeholders in these studies than it is to ask for their forgiveness”.

Data must be shared well for both researchers and society to reap the benefits. To do this, select an appropriate repository, adhere to any ethical/legal requirements, follow discipline-specific standards and make your data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). A key element of the latter is data documentation, an issue raised repeatedly during this session. Sharing the data alongside any associated code and detailed information about the data will enable it to be reused effectively and mitigate against misuse. Mihály discusses sharing the Digiwhist project data, which has been reused by academia, policy, civil society and the media, and emphasises this: “Every time I put out bits and pieces of my data and code that was not clear, I just kept on receiving the same question over and over again. So actually, it’s in your own best interests to document your work fully because then it is a lot more efficient for you”. Providing data about data is part of being completely transparent about the research process and results, enabling others to understand exactly what was done and to build on it. In some fields, this is an essential part of research reproducibility and replicability. As another example, Simon describes sharing the CBR Leximetric datasets – currently, the 2nd most downloaded dataset in Apollo and 8th of all UK institutional repositories – where not only the data were shared but also the methodology and an extensive codebook.

In both examples, being transparent in this way has led to wider reuse of these data and many citations of the data and associated publications. The benefits of FAIR data sharing and data reuse certainly do not rest solely in the number of resulting citations. Ethical and transparent research leads to credible research and researchers, enhancing reputations and quality of outputs. These are elements that all speakers highlighted in their talks. To end on a quote from Simon about the outcome of sharing data and of its subsequent reuse: “It’s been a very very positive experience for us”.  

We’re always happy to receive any questions or comments you may have about data sharing and reuse. You can contact us at info@data.cam.ac.uk and see our Research Data website for more information.

Additional resources

University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine guidance on secondary data use and related ethical considerations, discussed by Professor John Suckling.

The Digiwhist project website discussed by Dr Mihály Fazekas. The Digiwhist project is also one of the University’s research projects highlighted on the University of Cambridge global impact map.

Video of a previous talk by Professor Simon Deakin for OpenConCam 2016 talk on ‘Open Access and Knowledge Production 0 “Leximetric” Data Coding’.

The FAIR principles are outlined by Wilkinson et al. (2016) in Scientific Data – “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship”. There is also a useful guide for researchers on how to make your data FAIR.

Visit the University of Cambridge Research Data website for information on research data management, data sharing and guidance on depositing data into Apollo, the institutional repository. The site also hosts the University of Cambridge Research Data Management Policy framework, which is relevant to all research staff and students.