Tag Archives: RCUK

2015 – that was the year that was

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This time last year, the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University had been in existence for one week. As the inaugural Head of the Office, I had landed in the UK from Australia on 1 January, and was still battling jet lag. What a difference a year makes. This blog is a short run down of what has happened in 2015 and a brief peek into our plans for 2016.

The OSC has three primary foci – managing compliance with funders, external engagement and working with the Cambridge community to ensure awareness of broader scholarly communication issues. In our spare time we have also taken on a few projects.

Managing funder compliance

Open Access

The University of Cambridge is engaging its research community with open access with a broad approach, both offering solutions for compliance management and determining ways in which the community can continue their normative communication behaviours while increasing access to their research.

As with all universities in the UK, the Open Access service is managing multiple and conflicting open access policies in a complex publishing landscape. The RCUK open access policy has been in effect since April 2013, and the COAF policy continues the longstanding Wellcome Trust open access policy. In all the OSC manages annual funds from these of approximately £2 million to support open access compliance. HEFCE announced its upcoming open access REF policy in March 2014.

In October 2014 the University introduced a user experience evidence-based new system for compliance with the tag line “Accepted for publication? Send us your manuscript“. This is a system designed to ensure that the researcher only has to act once in order to comply with multiple policies. Researchers use an attractive and simple interface where they are asked to upload their manuscript, complete a short form and submit. Our OA team then check funder and publisher policies and deposit the work in the repository for HEFCE compliance and determine the payment options required and funds available for the article, using a decision tree. The team manage the article payment processes and contact the author once the work is complete. From the author perspective this is a simple and much liked system.

Outreach has included contacting departmental administrators, speaking to research communities, attending Committee meetings and so on to spread the word. Despite this, the team processes an average of 240 unique HECFE eligible papers per month, representing approximately 30% of research output.  While this may be cause for concern in relation to future REF compliance, a brief analysis of the open access publication activities of Cambridge researchers indicates that 60% of Cambridge research is being made available  – including through our system.

We continue to have challenges relating to publishers not making articles open access under the correct licence (or even at all) despite our payment of Article Processing Charges. The checking and chasing up of these publishers is extremely time consuming. In an attempt to ensure the publishers did what we were paying for we brought in Purchase Orders for the first half of the reporting period. This has caused serious issues when it came to reporting in terms of matching the articles listed in the Open Access systems against the financial systems of the University for reporting purposes to the RCUK. As it was not making any difference to publisher behaviour we abandoned this approach. The only issues we have encountered have been for articles that are hybrid – Cambridge University (across both the RCUK and COAF funds) spends approximately 74% on hybrid journals as opposed to fully OA journals.

There has been a constant reporting requirement throughout 2015, first to Jisc, then the RCUK, the Wellcome Trust and Jisc a second time. This has been a huge drain on personnel as none of the reporting periods align, requiring several months FTE equivalent’s worth of work. This is due to several issues, of which the Purchase Order problem mentioned above is a minor factor.  The large number of articles that are required to be reported on in detail on an individual basis is a complex task. 

Research Data Management

2015 has been a big year for Research Data Management, with the EPSRC announcing they would start checking to ensure researchers are making their underlying data available. The Research Data Facility has spent the year focused on increasing awareness, providing support and resources, and managing data with huge success. There have been face to face meetings with over 1300 researchers, and data submissions have risen exponentially (see here for a graphic of the numbers in July 2015). The team provides Research Data Management Plan support, and the data website has had over 16,500 visits.

We have spent a huge amount of time talking to the Cambridge research community. One outcome of these discussions is a deep understanding of the concerns and challenges for researchers in relation to data sharing. To address these we have provided fora for our researchers to meet with the funders to find solutions.  Our meetings with EPSRC and BBSRC resolved many concerns and resulted in an endorsed set of FAQs about research data sharing.

We have contributed to policy development by working with our contemporaries at many institutions to provide a coordinated response to the proposed UK Concordat on Research Data.

Systems management

A perennial issue with open access is the integration of systems within the institution to achieve the holy grail of ‘deposit once, use many times’. We are not there yet, although we have made good inroads. Cambridge University was one of the testbed institutions for DSpace, and the repository has been in place since 2005. The repository had suffered from a lack of attention and by the beginning of 2015 was not functioning properly and contained a large amount of bespoke coding.

The upgrade of DSpace from Version 3.4 to Version 4.3 took many months because it involved an associated standardisation of the base code to ensure future upgrades will be smooth. We also needed to create a new server platform for the repository to sit in which has stabilised our operations. The repository policy has been revisited and the agreements and licenses associated with minting DOIs are now in place, and the next step is to look at integration with other University systems.

We held a repository naming competition during the year, with the winning name being ‘Apollo’ – the god of logic.  The new name and logo will be launched when the repository interface is upgraded in early 2016. The repository now holds 13,269 articles and manuscripts, 359 datasets and 713 working papers. In total there are more than 200,000 items held in the repository – 175,429 of these are chemical structures.

Engagement and awareness

Within Cambridge

Cambridge University is a large and complex many-headed beast. Engaging this community is extremely challenging. The Office of Scholarly Communication runs a large number of electronic communication channels to ensure researchers are able to stay up to date and informed about open access and research data management, including the Research Data Management website, the Office of Scholarly Communication website and the Open Access website.

We send out monthly newsletters on Research Data Management to over 1000 subscribers, and at the end of 2015 launched a monthly Open Access newsletter – you can sign up here.  We use Twitter extensively (see @CamOpenData, @CamOpenAccess and @dannykay68). In addition the OSC has produced a series of advocacy materials to support their work.

But it is not all electronic – we have also have presented to over 1600 researchers and administrative staff during 2015 through events, presentations and workshops. Highlights have included workshops on software licensing,  an Open Access week joint event with Cambridge University Press addressing the question: ‘Can society afford open access?’ (see a video summary here), and an Open Data panel discussion ‘Open Data – moving science forward or a waste of money and time?‘. The video of this event is here.

More broadly

This Unlocking Research blog provides information and analysis on issues relating to Scholarly Communication, Open Access, Research Data Management and Library matters. The blog  is well used, with over 16,000 visits since launching.

The post with the greatest impact was Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer? with over 3,500 visits in the first week before it was reblogged by the London School of Economics. [Late news added 22 Jan 2016: This blog was listed as one of the Top Ten Posts for 2015: Open Access. It was also listed as one of the blogs that had an average minute per page measurement of over 6 minutes and 30 seconds.]

Members of the OSC are increasingly being invited to speak at conferences both within the UK and beyond. Topics have included:

We are also active participants in the discussions held amongst our communities within and outside of the UK. There is a high level of cooperation amongst those working in the area of scholarly communication and open access. The OSC contributes to meetings and initiatives organised by the League of European Research Universities, SPARC Europe and the UK Council of Research Repositories amongst others.

Training and support

Supporting Researchers in the 21st century

The OSC launched the ‘Supporting Researchers in the 21st century’ programme – aimed at library and other administrative staff – with three introductory workshops held over six weeks from May to early July. 103 people attended. Working from feedback obtained at these events the programme began offering training and workshops from late July.

Topics covered to date include Research Data Management for Librarians, a Primer on Open Access, Information Security in a Research Environment, Introduction to Metrics and a Day in the Life of Researcher and Meet an Open Access publisher. In addition there have been several opportunities to hear from visiting international experts including:

Research Support Ambassadors

The Research Support Ambassador programme began as an idea of a ‘crack team’ of people who could be deployed across the University to present workshops on Scholarly Communication issues. The general philosophy was that this was a way to encourage staff across the library community and across the grade range to step up.

We have had 18 brave souls volunteer to be the first group in what has frankly been a rather ‘organic’ process given we had no idea how this was going to play out.  The reasons members of the group gave for participating included the opportunity to learn more and gain skills, be able to support researchers better and several people wanted more face to face interactions. We ran two sets of intensive training sessions where we decided to focus on four areas:

  • Researcher Support in Cambridge
  • Managing your online presence
  • Making your thesis open access
  • The Research Lifecycle

We have taken a constructivist approach to learning – where learners take charge of their own learning. The group has worked with a mixture of self education and team work to try and develop ‘modular’ outputs that can be presented by others. There is a blog listing the progress on these topics to date here.

There have been significant challenges to the process with a mixture of new material and technologies, working in teams with new colleagues and limited time. In addition they have had to self direct as the recruitment process for an Research Skills Coordinator took eight months. To the Ambassador’s credit they have stuck through a confusing process with very little direction. There is a blog post on an insider’s view of the programme here.

Other projects

Unlocking Theses project

This project is the first step to dramatically increase the number of open access theses in the repository, which stood at about 600 at the beginning of 2015. On average one in ten PhD students deposit their thesis to make it available. The repository currently does not allow any other type of thesis to be deposited.

This system has meant that when a researcher requests a copy of a thesis for research purposes, the bound version needs to be scanned. In 2015 the Library held over 1200 scanned theses on an internal server. The Unlocking Theses project added all of these scanned theses held by the Library into the University repository, Apollo which now holds 2176 theses, of which 1,021 are openly accessible. The Development and Alumni Office were able to provide contact details for just over 600 of these authors. The majority of these authors have now been contacted and we have had a 35% positive response rate from them. We are in the final process of opening these theses. The remaining 1155 theses are currently held in a Restricted Theses Collection but the biographical information about these theses is searchable.

Managing Cambridge Journals project

Cambridge University Libraries are interested in supporting new forms of open access publishing.  In 2015 a search revealed that at least seven research and 13 student self-published journals and magazines currently circulate within the Cambridge community. These range widely in quality from almost professional publications to literally photocopied pages. The Managing Cambridge Journals project is working with Cambridge University Press to offer support to Cambridge researchers who are publishing outside of the traditional channels.  Three areas of potential support have been identified – a publishing platform, information and support and possibly an internal Cambridge publishing ‘brand’.  Work is already underway to ingest the full decade of articles published in the Cambridge Journal of China Studies into the repository from their currently unstable home on a website.

The team

Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 15.56.08To achieve all of this has required a huge effort on many people’s behalf. In January 2015 the OSC had three staff plus the Head – two Open Access Research Advisors and a part-time Repository Manager. Now the team sits at 12 people and this number is relatively fluid.

This sounds like a huge group – which it is. But with only two exceptions – of which the Head is one – all staff are either temporary staff or on extremely short term contracts. This is primarily related to (a lack of) funding and has two effects. First, a disproportionate amount of time is spent on managing recruitment, writing job descriptions, advertising, interviewing and so on. Almost all HR requirements are still enforced regardless of the brevity of contracts – including monthly probation interviews.

The second effect is the constant need to lobby for financial support which requires creating business cases, new organisational charts and many, many meetings. The Library has been nothing but supportive throughout this process, but there is a need for the broader institution to recognise that much of the work done in the OSC falls in the University rather than Library camp.

Looking forward to 2016

This upcoming year is shaping up to be as busy and productive as the first year of operation. Some of the planned activities include:

  • Negotiation with Research Council UK funders on possible funding options for the Research Data Facility.
  • The Communication across the Research Lifecycle project aims to join up communication with researchers by Cambridge administrative departments. This requires scoping the current communication channels and developing advocacy materials across the University administrative departments. There is currently no financial support for this project.
  • Participating in the JISC Shared Research Data Management Shared Services pilot
  • Increase the collaboration with Cambridge University Press on the Managing Cambridge Journals project to develop this project to operational level.
  • The second tranche of upgrades to DSpace are underway. This will involve an upgrade to V5 and implement ‘request a copy’ buttons, minting DOIs, registering the repository to wider aggregation systems and updating the look and feel of the interface. This work is expected to be completed by Easter 2016.
  • A Repository Integration Manager will start work on the interoperability of DSpace with Symplectic and other systems in the University. New forms and simple deposit processes will be developed.
  • Increase theses deposit by developing a new form, and amendment to the policy to allow all theses types to be deposited.
  • Pilot with selected departments to require the deposit of a digital thesis at the same time as the printed and bound version, with the option of making the work available.
  • Complete the first round of the Research Support Ambassador programme with some skills training and finalisation of training products before the group is released into the wild.
  • Negotiate with arXiv and other open access providers to allow researchers to meet funder requirements within their usual communication norms.
  • Develop a comprehensive Research Data Management training program for PhD students.
  • Build on the Supporting Researchers in the 21st century programme.
  • Present at conferences in the UK and abroad.

So, watch this space!

Published 11 January 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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Open Access around the world

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As part of the Office of Scholarly Communication Open Access Week celebrations, we are uploading a blog a day written by members of the team. Friday contains some observations from Dr Lauren Cadwallader on the bigger picture.

For researchers new to Open Access, it can often feel like policies are imposed on them by their institution. This is possibly because the wider context of Open Access has not been explained or revealed to them.

In a recent workshop held by the Office of Scholarly Communication we were asked “whether Open Access was just a UK thing and that the rest of the world were benefiting from the research funded by the taxes that we pay”. The answer is NO! Open Access is a global movement and involves both developed and developing countries. It is true that other people can benefit from our research but we can also benefit from theirs.

In the beginning…

The Open Access movement as it stands today had its beginnings in 2003 in a report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust on the economics on scientific research funding. Subsequent reports in 2004 by the Wellcome Trust and the House of Commons looked at the viability of alternatives to the subscriber-pays model used by journals. Over the other side of the world Queensland University of Technology in Australia introduced the world’s first University-wide open access mandate in 2004. Since this was introduced they have seen a correlation between research being open access and the rise in the ranking of the university.

OA timeline_V2

Following this, the US National Institute of Health, RCUK and the Wellcome Trust all released policies on open access in 2005. The next major development occurred in 2012 with the release of the Finch report, which has really set the scene for open access in the UK. Since then the open access movement has grown and spread around the world to both developed and developing countries. There is a potted history of open access listed here.

Open Access globally

Sixty-one countries have open access policies or repositories. Funders and governments throughout Europe, North America and Australia have open access policies already in place:

ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies, lists 730 policies that are active in 2014-15.

Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 16.12.51

Map of countries listed on ROARMAP – registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies – available here

Fourteen countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Uruguay and Venezuela – have come together to form the SciELO network – an Open Access repository of papers published by over 1000 journals from these countries and SciELO has been active for over 15 years.

Statistics from university repositories can give us an idea of who in the world is accessing Open Access articles. Harvard’s repository DASH has had over 21,000 downloads from Nigeria and 350,000 from the UK. The repository of the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela – whose motto is ¡concimiento libre! (free knowledge!) – has had over 2 million downloads from users in the US since 2008 and almost 38,000 from the UK.

This goes to show that there is a two-way (or rather multi-way) knowledge transfer between countries.

Benefits to All

So, what are the benefits of this two-way knowledge share? What do the UK tax payers gain?

Benefits of open access

Benefits of open access: A high resolution of this graphic is downloadable here

In academia itself open access can have an impact on a researcher’s visibility. Papers that are open access are more likely to be cited by other researchers and more like to be shared on the internet in blogs, news outlets and social media. This all raises the profile of the researcher and their metric scores – an increasingly important tool for deciding who gets funding or hired in some universities.

Individuals carrying out research – academics, school children, professionals in industry – can gain access to knowledge that they might otherwise not be able to get. The Harvard repository, DASH, encourages users to leave their personal stories of using the repository to access open access material. For example, a potential PhD student from the UK accessed papers to strengthen their application to Oxford; a nurse working in a remote Australian aboriginal community could pursue her interests in literature; a journalist in Mexico has been able to access material on the history of Mexican books that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get.

These stories give us a handle on how the research is used and the impact that Open Access can have beyond academia. In the future we are hoping to record stories like this from our own repository, Apollo.

UK taxpayers benefit from Open Access research because it can be used to make a difference to society and the economy. Research can influence public policy, industry can draw on ideas that propel their work forward, universities’ research profile is raised making them more likely to attract funding and the brightest minds, medical advancements can be made. For example, openly available research was used by a 15 year old schoolboy in the US to invent an inexpensive early detection test for pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancers. Whilst no cancer-detecting 15 year olds have come to light in the UK (yet!) this demonstrates the possibilities that come with Open Access, not just for academia but for everyone.

Published 23 October 2015
Written by Dr Lauren Cadwallader
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The purpose, practicalities, pitfalls and policies of managing and sharing data in the UK

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As part of the Office of Scholarly Communication Open Access Week celebrations, we are uploading a blog a day written by members of the team. Tuesday is a piece by Dr Danny Kingsley reflecting the talk she gave this morning to  the Royal Society of Chemistry, Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group conference – Measurement, Information and Innovation: Digital Disruption in the Chemical Sciences.

The data policy landscape

The policy position on data management in the UK is driven on many levels. Many institutions now have policies – an example is the Cambridge University Research Data Management Policy Framework. Increasingly publishers such as PLOS are requiring that research published in their journals is accompanied by the data underpinning the research. Some journals, such as Nature’s Scientific Data are specifically data-only journals

There has been a country-wide movement towards opening up data. Consultation on the Draft Concordat on Open Research Data released by the RCUK ended on 28 September. Cambridge coordinated a joint response to the Concordat with several other universities.

However the real driver for action this year has been funder policies – specifically, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) which announced it was going to (and has begun) checking compliance as of 1 May 2015.

The devil is in the detail

While the Research Councils UK have RCUK Common Principles on Data Policy stating “Publicly funded research data are a public good (…), which should be made openly available with as few restrictions as possible”, these common principles are idiosyncratic when looked at from the individual council perspective, as the graphic on the second page of this document demonstrates.

There are variations on whether a data management plan is required, where the data should be stored, the level of support offered and even whether this can be funded through the grant (in most cases it can, but not all).

Places to share data

Open (cross-disciplinary) repositories

These include commercial options such as figshare which is owned by Digital Science who also produce Symplectic Elements research management systems and are is an offshoot company to Macmillian/Springer.

Open source solutions such as Zenodo, an open dependable home for the long-tail of science, enabling researchers to share and preserve any research outputs in any size, any format and from any science, developed by CERN.

Disciplinary repositories

There are a significant number of disciplinary specific data repositories. In many ways these are the most natural place for data as disciplinary experts can curate the data. For example the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) runs seven repositories.

The first repository ever created (in 1991) was arXiv, holding e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. The public functional genomics data repository is Gene Expression Omnibus . Social science data can be deposited in the UK Data Service. The Oxford Text Archive holds literary and linguistic texts for higher education.

Institutional options

Cambridge University is using its DSpace repository Apollo to store and share data. To date the largest dataset we have received is 28 GB – huge datasets need to sit externally to this repository. Not all institutions provide a data repository service. There are significant overheads associated with this activity both for the technology and the people to upload and curate the data.

Journals

Journals are increasingly requiring researchers to publish (or at least provide links to) their supporting data alongside their research articles. PLOS brought in their data sharing policy in December 2013.

There is also a growing selection of data only journals on the market, for example Nature’s Scientific Data. Others include Journal of Open Archaeology Data, Open Health Data, Journal of Open Psychology Data, Gigascience, Bodiversity Data Journal and Earth System Science Data.

Aggregating services

The Australian National Data Service has built Research Data Australia (RDA) which collates and displays information about datasets held all over the country, both open and closed. As of the 20 October, the RDA contains 115,823 datasets, of which 23,322 are open.

There appears to be little appetite yet for this sort of service in the UK, or at least for providing funds to create one.

What are we actually trying to achieve ?

Cambridge University has taken a proactive approach to the RCUK data sharing policies by inviting funders to come and discuss issues with the research community. We have written up and published these discussions as an ‘In conversation with..’ series on our Unlocking Research blog.

In addition to clarification on some aspects of the policies, one of the questions we are trying to answer is what is the actual goal of these policies? Ben Ryan the Senior Manager, Research Outcomes of the EPSRC clarified that researchers needed to share:

  • the data that underpins publications
  • the data that validates research findings
  • the data that is worth keeping

To summarise the philosophical goals of the EPSRC policy:

  • The default position is ‘data should be open’
  • Published research findings should be testable
  • Maximise the impact of publicly funded research
  • Maintain public trust in science and research
  • They are trying to create a new research culture

Researcher responses

While these might seem like lofty and even admirable goals, it does not mean that the academic response to being informed of their grant requirement for sharing data have been met with welcoming arms. Far from it in some cases.

A small selection of the responses we have received in our meetings with over 1500 researchers this year at Cambridge include:

  • What’s the minimum we can get away with?
  • This is crap
  • ‘They’ are just doing this because ‘they’ can
  • But it will take a huge effort to get the data in a useable form
  • No-one will look at it
  • What a waste of time

This has prompted us to play a game we call ‘data excuse bingo’ at some of our Research Data Management Workshops – see slide 16.

We are trying to start at the end

The problem might be that everyone is fixated on sharing data at the end of the research process.  However this is one of the lesser data management activities if data management begins at the beginning.

The second of our “In conversation…” series was with Michael Ball the Strategy and Policy Manager at the Biotechnical and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). Amongst a long discussion about what exactly constitutes ‘data’ in the biological sciences, Michael emphasised that disciplines themselves must establish ways of dealing with data. This is the beginning of an ongoing process.

He noted that researchers need to consider how to deal with data from the beginning of a research project. Researchers can ask for money to manage data in the grant application (something which is currently quite rare).

The practice of sharing data requires the data to be: Accessible, Intelligible, Assessable and Reusable. So how do we achieve that?

Basics of Research Data Management

Good data management includes very basic practices such as:

  • Writing a research data management plan at the beginning of the research process – identifying all of these issues
  • Using a file naming protocol (including version control)
  • Backing up work in several places
  • Identifying any data that might be politically, personally or commercially sensitive
  • Determining who owns what data
  • Ensuring data that is being used for research across collaborations is shared in safe, secure and legal shared facilities, bearing in mind Export Control Legislation.
  • Having good metadata protocols
  • Using a reputable and reliable storage/sharing facility that offers persistent identifiers (DOIs)

Who owns the data?

This is an interesting question. EPSRC policies state that researchers should ensure that collaborators are aware of the sharing requirement before they embark on research. Then there are questions about who within the team might own the data – with again a suggestion to come to some sort of agreement before work starts.

Are all collaborators equal ‘owners’? Or does the Principal Investigator have a 50% stake, with the remaining split amongst the PhD students making up the remainder of the team? You might want to talk to your legal advisors and/or your research office about this issue.

There is also the related issue here of developing author-contribution transparency. Do you include author contribution statements in your articles?.

Staffing issues

If Michael Ball is correct and very few researchers are asking for funds associated with managing data, it is reasonable to assume that data is being managed in an ad hoc way – with reliance on the computer savvy postdoc the project hired …

Required skillsets for managing and curating data

There is a considerable range of skill sets associated with managing data, and these have been described by the Digital Curation Centre as data creator, data scientist, data librarian, data manager.

Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown’s 2008 report to Jisc on ‘The skills, role and career structure of data scientists and curators: an assessment of current practice and future needs’ described these as:

  • Data Creator: Researchers with domain expertise who produce data. These people may have a high level of expertise in handling, manipulating and using data
  • Data Scientist: People who work where the research is carried out – or, in the case of data centre personnel, in close collaboration with the creators of the data – and may be involved in creative enquiry and analysis, enabling others to work with digital data, and developments in data base technology
  • Data Manager: Computer scientists, information technologists or information scientists and who take responsibility for computing facilities, storage, continuing access and preservation of data
  • Data Librarian: People originating from the library community, trained and specialising in the curation, preservation and archiving of data

There is a simple graphic that clearly shows how these roles relate to one another.

Certainly an increasing number of data scientist jobs are being advertised. A search for ‘Data scientist’ + ‘London’ on the job site Indeed on 18 October produced 1,405 results. So where are all of these people coming from?

Training available

The Swan and Brown study in 2008 noted that ‘People in data science roles face a big, continuing challenge in remaining properly skilled up’ and this remain the situation today, although there are now many more opportunities for training – a few are listed here:

  • The Digital Curation Centre offers data management and curation education and training.
  • MANTRA is a free online course from the Data Library staff in Information Services, University of Edinburgh. It is designed for those who manage digital data as part of a research project. It was crafted for the use of post-graduate students, early career researchers, and also information professionals. It is freely available on the web for anyone to explore on their own.
  • Data Scientist training for Librarians is a collection of notes and discussions about data work done by librarians. They ran an experimental course in August to teach “the latest tools for extracting, wrangling, storing, analysing, and visualising data”.

In addition, the professionalisation of these skills is beginning. For example, Data Science London is a community of data scientists that meets regularly to discuss data science ideas, concepts, and tools, methods and technologies used by many startups to analyse large scale data (big data), extract predictive insight, and exploit business opportunities from data products. Their website offers a list of free data science courses.

Cambridge University is one of the five founding university partners of the about to be launched Alan Turing Institute, which is intended to be the UK’s national institute for data science. The Institute will be addressing some of the issues with the data management skill gap.

Issues with sharing data

For all of the ‘feel good’ ideals about sharing data, and the processes being put in place to support this, there are some serious issues raised by researchers about the requirement to share data.

To start, there is a very real concern that the UK will become unattractive for collaborations. Why would a commercial collaborator choose a UK partner when a partner from elsewhere is not under obligation to share their data?

There have been some discussions at information sessions about the possible need to change the type of research being done to reduce the amount of data being produced because of the cost of long term storage of this data.

Indeed, there is discussion in some circles about whether applying for EPSRC funding is worth the hassle. It is a fair bet that none of these were intended outcomes of the RCUK policies.

Consequences of not sharing data

However, this does need to be a balanced strategy. There is a considerable argument that openness is related to academic integrity as it allows work to be verified and validated.

Here are examples in three disciplines where sharing data had a dramatic effect:

  • Medicine – having the data publicly available in two trials of deworming pills demonstrated that a population wide deworming program did not improve school performance.
  • Economics – A study widely cited to justify budget cutting in the US had a mistake in the calculations which was only revealed when the Excel file was released
  • Physics – It took 12.5 years to withdraw Jan Hendrik Schon’s work on ‘organic semiconductors’ because the reviewers were unable to replicate the results without access to the original data or lab books.

Conclusion

Sharing data offers great challenges to the research community, not least because it is less than clear what ‘data’ means in different disciplines. It will take some time for the research community to change its philosophy and practice. But the positives outweigh the negatives and with hope we will look back at this time as a short transition period.

Note the slides from the talk are available in Slideshare.

Published 20 October 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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