Tag Archives: text and data mining

Next steps for Text & Data Mining

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Sometimes the best way to find a solution is to just get the different stakeholders talking to each other – and this what happened at a recent Text and Data Mining symposium held in the Engineering Department at Cambridge.

The attendees were primarily postgraduate students and early career researchers, but senior researchers, administrative staff, librarians and publishers were also represented in the audience.

Background

This symposium grew out of a discussion held earlier this year at Cambridge to consider the issue of TDM and what a TDM library service might look like at Cambridge. The general outcome of that meeting of library staff was that people wanted to know more. Librarians at Cambridge have developed a Text and Data Mining libguide to assist.

So this year the OSC has been doing some work around TDM, including running a workshop at Research Libraries UK annual conference in March. This was a discussion about developing a research library position statement on Text and Data Mining in the UK. The slides from that event are available and we published a blog post about the discussion.

We have also had discussions with different groups about this issue including the Future TDM project which has been looking to increase  the amount of TDM happening across Europe. This project is now finishing up. The impression we have around the sector is that ‘everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing’.

Symposium structure

With this general level of understanding of TDM as our base point, we structured the day to provide as much information as possible to the attendees. The Twitter hashtag for the event is #osctdm, and the presentations from the event are online.

The keynote presentation was by Kiera McNeice, from the FutureTDM Project who have an overview of what TDM is, how it can be achieved and what the barriers are. There is a video of her presentation (note there were some audio issues in the beginning of the recording).

The event broke into two parallel sessions after this. The main room was treated to a presentation about Wikimedia from Cambridge’s Wikimedian in Residence, Charles Matthews. Then Alison O’Mara-Eves discussed Managing the ‘information deluge’: How text mining and machine learning are changing systematic review methods. A video of Alison’s presentation is available.

In the breakout room, Dr Ben Outhwaite discussed Marriage, cheese and pirates: Text-mining the Cairo Genizah  before Peter Murray Rust spoke about ContentMine: mining the scientific literature.

After lunch, Rosemary Dickin from PLOS talked about Facilitating Test and Data Mining how an open access publisher supports TDM. PhD candidate Callum Court presented ChemDataExtractor: A toolkit for automated extraction of chemical information from the scientific literature. This presentation was filmed.

In the breakout room, a discussion about how librarians support TDM was led by Yvonne Nobis and Georgina Cronin. In addition there was a presentation from John McNaught –  the Deputy Director of the National Centre for Text and Data Mining (NaCTeM), who presented Text mining: The view from NaCTeM .

Round table discussion

The day concluded with the group reconvening together for a roundtable (which was filmed) to discuss the broader issue of why there is not more TDM happening in the UK.

We kicked off by asking each of the people who had presented during the event to describe what they saw as the major barrier for TDM. The answers ranged from the issue of recruiting and training staff to the legal challenges and policies needed at institutional level to support TDM and the failure of institutions and government to show leadership on the issue. We then opened up the floor to the discussion.

A librarian described what happens when a publisher cuts off access, including the process the library has to go through with various areas of the University to reinstate access. (Note this was the reason why the RLUK workshop concluded with the refrain: ‘Don’t cut us off!’). There was some surprise in the group that this process was so convoluted.

However, the suggestion that researchers let the library know that they want to do TDM and the library will organise permissions was rejected by the group, on both the grounds that it is impractical for researchers to do this, and that the effort associated with obtaining permission would take too long.

A representative from Taylor and Francis suggested that researchers contact the publishers directly and let them know. Again this was rejected as ‘totally impractical’ because of the assumption this made about the nature of research. Far from being a linear and planned activity, it is iterative and  to request access for a period of three months and to then have to go back to extend this permission if the work took an unexpected turn would be impractical, particularly across multiple publishers.

One attendee in her blog about the event noted: “The naivety of the publisher, concerning research methodology, in this instance was actually quite staggering and one hopes that this publisher standpoint isn’t repeated across the board.”

Some researchers described the threats they had received from publishers about downloading material. There was anger about the inherent message that the researcher had done something criminal.

There was also some concern raised that TDM will drive price increases as publishers see ‘extra value’ to be extracted from their resources. This sparked off a discussion about how people will experiment if anything is made digitally available.

During the hour long session the conversation moved from high level problems to workflows. How do we actually do this? As is the way with these types of events, it was really only in the last 10 minutes that the real issues emerged.  What was clear was something I have repeatedly observed over the past few years – that the players in this space including librarians, researchers and publishers, have very little idea of how the others work and their needs. I have actually heard people say: ‘If only they understood…’

Perhaps it is time we started having more open conversations?

Next steps

Two things have come out of this event. The first is that people have very much asked for some hands on sessions. We will have to look at how we will deliver this, as it is likely to be quite discipline specific.

The second is there is clearly a very real need for publishers, researches and librarians to get into a room together to discuss the practicalities of how we move forward in TDM. One of the comments on Twitter was that we need to have legal expertise in the room for this discussion. We will start planning this ‘stakeholder’ event after the summer break.

Feedback

The items that people identified as the ‘one most important thing’ they learnt was instructive. The answers reflect how unaware people are of the tools and services available, and of how access to information works. Many of the responses listed specific tools or services they had found out about, others commented on the opportunities for TDM.

There were many comments about publishers, both the bad:

  • Just how much impact the chilling effect of being cut off by publishers has on researchers
  • That researchers have received threats from publishers
  • Very interesting about publishers and ways of working with them to ensure not cut off
  • Lots can be done but it is being hindered by publishers

and the good:

  • That PLOS is an open access journal
  • That there are reasonable publishing companies in the UK
  • That journals make available big data for meta analysis

Commentary about the event

There has been some online discussion and blog posts on the event:

Published 17 August 2017
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley 
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Service Level Agreements for TDM

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Librarians expect publishers to support our researchers’ rights to Text and Data Mining and not cut access off for a library if they see ‘suspicious’ activity before they establish whether it is legitimate or not. These were the conclusions of a group who met at a workshop to discuss provision of Text and Data Mining services in March. The final conclusions were:

Expectations libraries have of publishers over TDM

The workshop concluded with very different expectations to what was originally proposed. The messages to publishers that were agreed were:

  1. Don’t cut us off over TDM activity! Have a conversation with us first if you notice abnormal behaviour*
  2. If you do cut us off and it turns out to be legitimate then we expect compensation for the time we were cut off
  3. Mechanisms for TDM where certain behaviours are expected need to be built into separate licensing agreements for TDM

*And if you want to cut us off – please demonstrate there are all these illegal TDM activities happening in the UK

Workshop on TDM

The workshop “Developing a research library position statement on Text and Data Mining in the UK” was part of the recent RLUK2017 conference.  My colleagues, Dr Debbie Hansen from the Office of Scholarly Communication and Anna Vernon from Jisc, and I wanted to open up the discussion about Text and Data Mining (TDM) with our library community. We have made the slides available and they contain a summary of all the discussions held during the event. This short blog post is an analysis of that discussion.

We started the workshop with a quick analysis of who was in the room using a live survey tool called Mentimeter. Eleven participants came from research institutions – six large, four small and one  from an ‘other research institution’. There were two publishers, and four people who identified as ‘other’ – which were intermediaries. Of the 19 attendees, 14 worked in a library. There was only one person who said they had extensive experience in TDM, four people said they were TDM practitioners but the largest group were the 14 who classified themselves as having ‘heard of TDM but have had no practical experience’.

The workshop then covered what TDM is, what the legal situation is and what publishers are currently saying about TDM . We then opened up the discussion.

Experiences of TDM for participants

In the initial discussion about experiences of the participants, a few issues were raised if libraries were to offer TDM services. Indeed there was a question whether this should form part of library service delivery at all. The issue is partly that this is new legislation, so currently publisher and institutions are reactive, not strategic in relation to TDM. We agreed:

  • There is a need for clearer understanding of the licensing situation with information
  • We also need to create a mechanism of where to go for advice, both within the institution and the publisher
  • We need to develop procedures of what to do with requests – which is a policy issue 
  • Researcher behaviour is a factor – academics are not concerned by copyright.

Offering TDM is a change of role of the library – traditionally libraries have existed to preserve access to items. The group agreed we would like to be enabling this activity rather than saying “no you can’t”. There are library implications for offering support for TDM, not least that librarians are not always aware of TDM taking place within their institution. This makes it difficult to be the central point for the activity. In addition, TDM could threaten access through being cut off, so this is causing internal disquiet.

TDM activity underway in Europe & UK

We then presented to the workshop some of the activities in TDM that are happening internationally, such as the FutureTDM project. There was also a short run down on the new copyright exception for research organisations carrying out research in public interest being proposed to the European Commission allowing researchers to carry out TDM of copyright protected content if they have lawful access (e.g. subscription) without prior authorisation.

ContentMine is a not for profit organisation that supplies open source TDM software to access and analyse documents. They are currently partnering with Wikimedia Foundation with a grant to develop WikiFactMine which is a project aiming to make scientific data available to editors of Wikidata and Wikipedia.

The ChemDataExtractor is a tool built by the Molecular Engineering Group at the University of Cambridge. It is an open source software package that extracts chemical information from scientific documentation (e.g. text, tables). The extracted data can be used for onward analysis. There is some information in a paper  in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling: “ChemDataExtractor: A Toolkit for Automated Extraction of Chemical Information from the Scientific Literature“.

The Manchester Institute of Biotechnology hosts the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), which works with research partners to provide text mining tools and services in the biomedical field.

The British Library had a call for applications for a PhD student placement to undertake thesis text mining on 150,000 theses held in EThOS to extract new metadata such as names of supervisors.  Applications closed 20 February 2017, but according to an EThOS newsletter from March,  they had received no applications for the placement. The suggestion is that “perhaps that few students have content mining skills sufficiently well developed to undertake such a challenging placement”.

The problem with supporting TDM in libraries

We proposed to the workshop group that libraries are worried about getting cut off from their subscription by publishers due to large downloads of papers through TDM activity. This is because publishers’ systems are pre-programmed to react to suspicious activity. If TDM invokes automated investigation, then this may cause an access block.

However universities need to maintain support mechanism to ensure continuity of access. For this to occur we require workflows for swift resolution, fast communication and a team of communicators. This also requires education of researchers of potential issues.

We asked the group to discuss this issue – noting reasons why their organisation is not actively supporting TDM and if they are the main challenges they face.

Discussion about supporting TDM in libraries

The reasons put forward for not supporting TDM included practical issues such as the challenges of handling physical media and the risk of lockout.

The point was made that there was a lack of demand for the service. This is possibly because the researchers are not coming to the Library for help. There may be a lack of awareness in the IT areas that the Library can help and they may not even pass on the queries.  This points to the need for internal discussion with institutions.

It was noted that there was an assumption in the discussion that the Library is at the centre of this type of activity, however and we are not joined up as organisations. The question is who is responsible for this activity? There is often no institutional view on TDM because the issues are not raised at academic level. Policy is required.

Even if researchers do come to the library, there are questions about how we can provide a service. Initially we would be responding to individual queries, but how do we scale it up?

The challenges raised included the need for libraries to ensure everyone understands the needs at the the content owner level. The library, as the coordinator of this work would need to ensure the TDM is not for commercial use, and need to ensure people know their responsibilities. This means the library is potentially being intrusive on the researcher process.

Service Level Agreement proposal

The proposal we put forward to the group was that we draft a statement for a Service Level Agreement for publishers to assure us that if the library is cut off, but the activity is legal, we will be reinstated within and agreed period of time. We asked the group to discuss the issues if we were to do this.

Expectation of publishers

The discussion has raised several issues libraries had experienced with publishers over TDM. One participants said the contract with a particular publisher to allow their researchers to do TDM took two years to finalise.

There was a recognition that for genuine TDM to be identified might require some sort of registry of TDM activity which might not be an administrative task all libraries want to take on. The alternative suggestion was a third party IP registry, which could avoid some of the manual work. Given that LOCKSS crawls publisher software without getting trapped, this could work in the same way with a bank of IP addresses that is secured for this purpose.

Some solutions that publishers could help with include publishers delivering material in different ways – not on a hard drive. The suggestion was that this could be part of a platform and the material was produced in a format that allowed TDM (at no extra cost).

Expectation of libraries

There was some distaste amongst the group for libraries to take on the responsibility for maintaining  a TDM activity register. However libraries could create a safe space for TDM like virtual private networks.

Licenses are the responsibility of libraries, so we are involved whether we wish to be or not. Large scale computational reading is completely different from current library provision. There are concerns that licensing via the library could be unsuitable for some institutions. This raises issues of delivery and legal responsibilities. One solution for TDM could be to record IP address ranges in licence agreements. We need to consider:

  • How do we manage the licenses we are currently signed up to?
  • How do we manage licensing into the future so we separate different uses? Should we have a separate TDM ‘bolt on’ agreement.

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) solution

The group noted that, particularly given the amount publisher licenses cost libraries, being cut off for a week or two weeks with no redress is unusual at best in a commercial environment. At minimum publishers should contact the library to give the library a grace period to investigate rather than being cut off automatically.

The basis for the conversation over the SLA includes the fact that the law is on the subscriber’s side if everyone is doing it legally. It would help to have an understanding of the extent of infringing activity going on with University networks (considering that people can ‘mask’ themselves). This would be useful for thinking of thresholds.

Next steps

We need to open up the conversation to a wider group of librarians. We are hoping that we might be able to work with RLUK and funding councils to come to an agreed set of requirements that we can have endorsed by the community and which we can then take to to publishers.

Debbie Hansen and Danny Kingsley attended the RLUK conference thanks to the support of the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

Published 30 March 2017
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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Forget compliance. Consider the bigger RDM picture

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The Office of Scholarly Communication sent Dr Marta Teperek, our Research Data Facility Manager to the  International Digital Curation Conference held in in Amsterdam on 22-25 February 2016. This is her report from the event.

Fantastic! This was my first IDCC meeting and already I can’t wait for next year. There was not only amazing content in high quality workshops and conference papers, but also a great opportunity to network with data professionals from across the globe. And it was so refreshing to set aside our UK problem of compliance with data sharing policies, to instead really focus on the bigger picture: why it is so important to manage and share research data and how to do it best.

Three useful workshops

The first day started really intensely – the plan was for one full day or two half-day workshops, but I managed to squeeze in three workshops in one day.

Context is key when it comes to data sharing

The morning workshop was entitled “A Context-driven Approach to Data Curation for Reuse” by Ixchel Faniel (OCLC), Elizabeth Yakel (University of Michigan), Kathleen Fear (University of Rochester) and Eric Kansa (Open Context). We were split into small groups and asked to decide what was the most important information about datasets from the re-user’s point of view. Would the re-user care about the objects themselves? Would s/he want to get hints about how to use the data?

We all had difficulties in arranging the necessary information in order of usefulness. Subsequently, we were asked to re-order the information according to the importance from the point of view of repository managers. And the take-home message was that for all of the groups the information about datasets required by the re-user was the not same as that required from the repository.

In addition, the presenters provided discipline-specific context based on interviews with researchers – depending on the research discipline, different information about datasets was considered the most important. For example, for zoologists, the information about specimen was very important, but it was of negligible importance to social scientists. So context is crucial for the collection of appropriate metadata information. Insufficient contextual information makes data not useful.

So what can institutional repositories do to address these issues? If research carried out within a given institution only covers certain disciplines, then institutional repositories could relatively easily contextualise metadata information being collected and presented for discovery. However, repositories hosting research from many different disciplines will find this much more difficult to address. For example, Cambridge repository has to host research spanning across particle physics, engineering, economics, archaeology, zoology, clinical medicine and many, many others. This makes it much more difficult (if not impossible) to contextualise the metadata.

It is not surprising that information most important from the repository’s point of view is different that the most important information required by the data re-users. In order to ensure that research data can be effectively shared and preserved in long term, repositories need to collect certain amount of administrative metadata: who deposited the data, what are the file formats, what are the data access conditions etc. However, repositories should collect as much administrative metadata as possible in an automated way. For example, if the user logs in to deposit data, all the relevant information about the user should be automatically harvested by feeds from human resources systems.

EUDAT – Pan-European infrastructure for research data

The next workshop was about EUDAT – the collaborative Pan-European infrastructure providing research data services, training and consultancy for researchers. EUDAT is an impressive project funded by Horizon2020 grant and it offers five different types of services to researchers:

  • B2DROP – a secure and trusted data exchange service to keep research data synchronized, up-to-date and easy to exchange with other researchers;
  • B2SHARE – service for storing and sharing small-scale research data from diverse contexts;
  • B2SAFE – service to safely store research data by replicating it and depositing at multiple trusted repositories (additional data backups);
  • B2STAGE – service to transfer datasets between EUDAT storage resources and high-performance computing (HPC) workspaces;
  • B2FIND – discovery service harvesting metadata from research data collections from EUDAT data centres and other repositories.

The project has a wide range of services on offer and is currently looking for institutions to pilot these services with. I personally think these are services which (if successfully implemented) would be of a great value to Pan-European research community.

However, I have two reservations about the project:

  • Researchers are being encouraged to use EUDAT’s platforms to collaborate on their research projects and to share their research data. However, the funding for the project runs out in 2018. EUDAT team is now investigating options to ensure the sustainability and future funding for the project, but what will happen to researchers’ data if the funding is not secured?
  • Perhaps if the funding is limited it would be more useful to focus the offering on the most useful services, which are not provided elsewhere. For example, another EC-funded project, Zenodo, already offers a user-friendly repository for research data; Open Science Framework offers a platform for collaboration and easy exchange of research data. Perhaps EUDAT could initially focus on developing services which are not provided elsewhere. For example, having a Pan-Europe service harvesting metadata from various data repositories and enabling data discovery is clearly much needed and would be extremely useful to have.

Jisc Shared RDM Services for UK institutions

I then attended the second half of Jisc workshop on shared Research Data Management services for UK institutions. The University of York and the University of Cambridge are two of 13 pilot institutions participating in the pilot. Jenny Mitcham from York and I gave presentations on our institutional perspectives on the pilot project: where we are at the moment and what are our key expectations from the pilot. Jenny gave an overview of an impressive work by her and her colleagues on addressing data preservation gaps at the University of York. Data preservation was one of the areas in which Cambridge hopes to get help from the Jisc RDM shared services project. Additionally, as we described before, Cambridge would greatly benefit from solutions for big data and for personal/sensitive data. My presentation from the session is available here.

Presentations were followed by breakout group discussions. Participants were asked to identify the areas of priorities for the Jisc RDM pilot. The top priority identified by all the groups seemed to be solutions for personal/sensitive data and for effective data access management. This was very interesting to me as at similar workshops held by Jisc in the UK, breakout groups prioritised interoperability with their existing institutional systems and cost-effectiveness. This could be one of the unforeseen effects of strict funders’ research data policies in the UK, which required institutions to provide local repositories to share research data.

As a result of these policies, many institutions were tasked with creating institutional data repositories from scratch in a very short time. Most of the UK universities now have institutional repositories which allow research data to be uploaded and shared. However, very few universities have their repositories well integrated with other institutional systems. Not having the policy pressure in non-UK countries perhaps allowed institutions to think more strategically about developing their RDM service provisions and ensure that developed services are well embedded within the existing institutional infrastructure.

Conference papers and posters

The two following days were full of excellent talks. My main problem was which sessions to attend: talking with other attendees I am aware that the papers presented at parallel sessions were also extremely useful. If the budget allows, I certainly think that it would be useful for more participants from each institution to attend the meeting to cover more parallel sessions.

Below are my main reflections from keynote talks.

Barend Mons – Open Science as a Social Machine

This was a truly inspirational talk, raising a lot of thought-provoking discussions. Barend started from a reflection that more and more brilliant brains, with more and more powerful computers and with billions of smartphones, created a single, interconnected social super-machine. This machine generates data – vast amount of data – which is difficult to comprehend and work with, unless proper tools are used.

Barend mentioned that with the current speed of new knowledge being generated and papers being published, it is simply impossible for human brains to assimilate the constantly expanding amount of new knowledge. Brilliant brains need powerful computers to process the growing amount of information. But in order for science to be accessible to computers, we need to move away from pdfs. Our research needs to be machine-readable. And perhaps if publishers do not want to support machine-readability, we need to move away from the current publishing model.

Barend also stressed that if data is to be useful and correctly interpretable, it needs to be accessible not only to machines, but also to humans, and that effort is needed to make data well described. Barend said that research data without proper metadata description is useless (if not harmful). And how to make research data meaningful? Barend proposed a very compelling solution: no more research grants should be awarded without 5% of money dedicated for data stewardship.

I could not agree more with everything that Barend said. I hope that research funders will also support Barend’s statement.

Andrew Sallans – nudging people to improve their RDM practice

Andrew started his talk from a reflection that in order to improve our researchers’ RDM practice we need to do better than talking about compliance and about making data open. How a researcher is supposed to make data accessible, if the data was not properly managed in the first place? The Open Science Framework has been created with three mission statements:

  • Technology to enable change;
  • Training to enact change;
  • Incentives to embrace change.

So what is the Open Science Framework (OSF)? It is an open source platform to support researchers during the entire research lifecycle: from the start of the project, through data creation, editing and sharing with collaborators and concluding with data publication. What I find the most compelling about the OSF is that is allows one to easily connect various storage platforms and places where researchers collaborate on their data in one place: researchers can easily plug their resources stored on Dropbox, Googledrive, GitHub and many others.

To incentivise behavioural change among researchers, the OSF team came up with two other initiatives:

Personally, I couldn’t agree more with Andrew that enabling good data management practice should be the starting point. We can’t expect researchers to share their research data if we have not helped them with providing tools and support for good data management. However, I am not so sure about the idea of cash rewards.

In the end researchers become researchers because they want to share the outcomes of their research with the community. This is the principle behind academic research – the only way of moving ideas forward is to exchange findings with colleagues. Do researchers need to be paid extra to do the right thing? I personally do not think so and I believe that whoever decides to pursue an academic career is prepared to share. And it is our task to make data management and sharing as easy as possible, and the use of OSF will certainly be of a great aid for the community.

Susan Halford – the challenge of big data and social research

The last keynote was from Susan Halford. Susan’s talk was again very inspirational and thought-provoking. She talked about the growing excitement around big data and how trendy it has become; almost being perceived as a solution to every problem. However, Susan also pointed out the problems with big data. Simply increasing the computational power and not fully comprehending the questions and the methodology used can lead to serious misinterpretations of results. Susan concluded that when doing big data research one has to be extremely careful about choosing proper methodology for data analysis, reflecting on both the type of data being collected, as well as (inter)disciplinary norms.

Again – I could not agree more. Asking the right question and choosing the right methodology are key to make the right conclusions. But are these problems new to big data research? I personally think that we are all quite familiar with these challenges. Questions about the right experimental design and the right methodology have been known to humankind since scientific method is used.

Researchers always needed to design studies carefully before commencing to do the experiments: what will be the methodology, what are the necessary controls, what should be the sample size, what needs to happen for the study to be conclusive? To me this is not a problem of big data, to me this is a problem that needs to be addressed by every researcher from the very start of the project, regardless of the amount of data the project generates or analyses.

Birds of a Feather discussions

I had not experienced Birds of a Feather Discussions (BoF) before at a conference and I am absolutely amazed by the idea. Before the conference started the attendees were invited to propose ideas for discussions keeping in mind that BoF sessions might have the following scope:

  • Bringing together a niche community of interest;
  • Exploring an idea for a project, a standard, a piece of software, a book, an event or anything similar.

I proposed a session about sharing of personal/sensitive data. Luckily, the topic was selected for a discussion and I co-chaired the discussion together with Fiona Nielsen from Repositive. We both thought that the discussion was great and our blog post from the session is available here.

And again, I was very sorry to be the only attendee from Cambridge at the conference. There were four parallel discussions and since I was chairing one of them, I was unable to take part in the others. I would have liked to be able to participate in discussions on ‘Data visualisation’ and ‘Metadata Schemas’ as well.

Workshops: Appraisal, Quality Assurance and Risk Assessment

The last day was again devoted to workshops. I attended an excellent workshop from the Pericles project on the appraisal, quality assurance and risk assessment in research data management. The project was about how an institutional repository should conduct data audits when accepting data deposits and also how to measure the risks of datasets becoming obsolete.

These are extremely difficult questions and due to their complexity, very difficult to address. Still, the project leaders realised the importance of addressing them systematically and ideally in an (semi)automated way by using specialised software to help repository managers making the right preservation decisions.

In a way I felt sorry for the presenters – their project progress and ambitions were so high that probably none of us, attendees, were able to critically contribute to the project – we were all deeply impressed by the high level of questions asked, but our own experience with data preservation and policy automation was nowhere at the level demonstrated by the workshop leaders.

My take home message from the workshop is that proper audit of ingested data is of crucial importance. Even if there is no automation of risk assessment possible, repository managers should at least collect information about files being deposited to be able to assess the likelihood of their obsolescence in the future. Or at least to be able to identify key file formats/software types as selected preservation targets to ensure that the key datasets do not become obsolete. For me the workshop was a real highlight of the conference.

Networking and the positive energy

Lots of useful workshops, plenty of thought-provoking talks. But for me one of the most important parts of the conference was meeting with great colleagues and having fascinating discussions about data management practices. I never thought I could spend an evening (night?) with people who would be willing to talk about research data without the slightest sights of boredom. And the most joyful and refreshing part of the conference was that due to the fact we were from across the globe, our discussions diverted away from the compliance aspect of data policies. Free from policy, we were able to address issues of how to best support research data management: how to best help researchers, what are our priority needs, what data managers should do first with our limited resources.

I am looking forward to catching up next year with all the colleagues I have met in Amsterdam and to see what progress we will have all made with our projects and what should be our collective next moves.

Summarising, I came back with lots of new ideas and full of energy and good attitude – ready to advocate for the bigger picture and the greater good. I came back exhausted, but I cannot imagine spending four days any more productively and fruitfully than at IDCC.

Thanks so much to the organisers and to all the participants!

Published 8 March 2016
Written by Dr Marta Teperek

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