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Data Diversity Podcast #5 – Abdulwahab Alshallal

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Welcome back to another edition of the Data Diversity Podcast, the Research Data podcast from the University of Cambridge Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC). If this is your first time here, in this podcast, I speak to Cambridge Data Champions about their journeys in acquiring and working with data in their research, with the hope to highlight interesting facets of data work, but also academic research in general. In this episode, I spoke to Cambridge PhD student Abdulwahab Alshallal, from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and who is part of the Physical Activity Epidemiology research group.  

Currently for his PhD, he is exploring associations of physical activity, behaviour and fitness with cardio metabolic risk in different global populations. Abdulwahab recently presented at a Data Champion Forum, where he talked about working with datasets from international sources, specifically from non-Western nations, and discussed the barriers to collaboration and differences in the flexibility of institutions regarding data access and sharing. In this episode, we discussed those matters and also went into his aspirations for public health policy making and how his data driven mindset applies to this endeavour. 

I am of the mind that your social and physical environments are a big determinant of your physical activity and your general lifestyle behaviours. For example, it is unfair to to compare the UK and India because it is much easier to cycle in streets and walk around in the UK than it is in India, or Mexico or even Kuwait, and the barriers can be different. It could be pedestrian access, it could be heat, in my case it would be humidity. All of these factors matter, and we need to get data to represent those populations and use that data in such studies. – Abdulwahab Alshallal

The overrepresentation of data from Western studies in global understandings of fitness 

LO: Is it true to say that most of the data that is available now is all based on Western data sources and is it problematic then to use that to represent a global understanding of fitness?

AA: I would rephrase that. It is not that the data does not exist, rather, it is that its representation in the literature is absent. The data exists but when it comes to the data making into the literature and influencing policy guidelines, this is not yet prevalent. Take for example physical activity guidelines: every few years, data from a lot of the literature of what is published is gathered and used to make new recommendations for physical activity. It is through these guidelines that it was recommended that people exercise, for example, 30 to 60 minutes of physical activity per day. Now, the guidelines say that it is 150 minutes of physical activity per week, no matter which day you do it. But the data that influences these policies are mostly data from North America, Europe, Australia (because these are the data used in the literature cited for the creation of these guidelines). This implies that we do not think that it matters much to look at data from other places, because humans are humans. But I am of the mind that your social and physical environments are a big determinant of your physical activity and your general lifestyle behaviours. For example, it is unfair to to compare the UK and India because it is much easier to cycle in streets and walk around in the UK than it is in India, or Mexico or even Kuwait and the barriers can be different. It could be pedestrian access, it could be heat, in my case, it would be humidity. All of these factors matter, and we need to get data to represent those populations and use that data in such studies. 

The data does exist and thankfully I have made an effort to do include it in my research. One of the places where you can acquire this data is from the World Health Organisation (WHO). That is the most wide-ranging data source, and then the few others that I’m using are from the South Asia Biobank, which covers four countries in South Asia: India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Another source is the biobank from the UAE Healthy Future Study which would cover the Gulf populations, and the Qatar biobank.  

Data in his research 

LO: what are the research questions that you’re asking and what and and how is data used, or what data is needed to answer those questions? 

AA: I am interested in physical activity and asking are the associations of physical activity in the different ethnic populations different or the same? Does it matter where you live in the world? And we have made progress in this discovery. You would be the first to hear this actually but we have finished up our analysis for my first paper, and this is using the WHO data. We are close to submitting the manuscript. This is a bit of a segue but it is worth mentioning because it highlights one of the problems of the literature, but this paper touches on one of the controversies in my field. What the paper addresses is that all physical activity is good for you. For some context: there has been a recent phenomenon that we found in the current literature that uses mostly European data, that views occupational and non-occupational physical activity separately. They show that non-occupational physical activity is good for you, but occupational physical activity either has no effect or is actually bad for you in terms of mortality outcomes. What is alarming for us to instigate is to frame a paper that states that in low- and low-income countries outside of Europe, there is very little concept of non-occupational leisure time physical activity. Most of your activity is going to be in travel behavior or activity during your occupation, for example if you are doing heavy manual labor like construction and farming. So, we had to investigate that and I’m glad to report that, at least in terms of our findings, we found that occupational physical activity is not bad for you. Non-occupational physical activity is also good for you and it doesn’t matter what type of activity you do. We also were able to control the proportion accumulated in either occupational and non-occupational physical activity and based on what we found, any physical activity wherever you do it is good for you. 

We need to understand the physical activity in different parts of the world. The types of activity you’re going in one part of the world is going to be different to other parts of the world so one guideline is not going to be appropriate. We currently have one guideline from The WHO for the whole world which has 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity as the goal. Does that seem appropriate for the whole world? It might not be in terms of different countries or even different population subgroups such as young versus old or men versus women, or different occupations or different activity levels, and what really is the barrier between light, physical activity and moderate activity? It is going to be relative and likely complex. This is a shift of mindset that hopefully I will be able to contribute through my research. 

The experience of acquiring data for his research from global data banks

LO: What has your experience of acquiring data from different sources been? From what I understand, there are different barriers in place to getting the data. 

AA: Just to put it out there, I think it’s completely understandable that these barriers are in place. The data that these organisations produce is particularly high-quality, high-resolution data. Besides the WHO data, the studies from the biobank’s that I have mentioned plan on collecting data every few years from the same participants so the data really tells you about the health of the population because these cohorts are meant to be representative of the population. To put this data in the hands of researchers that you do not properly vet can be quite a risk, even if it means using anonymised data, so I completely understand the barriers. 

In terms of the the difficulty in which to get that data, it has been different. In regard to WHO data – and this is not my experience, but an experience of a researcher before me, a post doc that that worked on the same data set before me – a few years back she had to go all the way to Geneva and to perform the data analysis there because they did not have an online infrastructure in order to allow researchers from abroad to use the data. That has since changed and the way that I was able to request it is through the WHO microdata Repository.  

For the South Asia Biobank, after going through the data request, researchers are given a link to the data. The data request process itself is very comprehensive and can cause delays. It takes a lot of time, and there is a lot of emphasis on the protocol. They want to make sure that you have a proper protocol to say what you’re authorized to do. If you want to make small changes, even small changes, you have to rectify them before submitting the proposal and that can cause delays. In my case it took around six months and we just received the data, so we have not had a chance to use it. 

For the UAE healthy future study, it is actually a bit more secure than that. You do go through that process of the back and forth of going through the protocol. In terms of getting the data, from what I understand, you are using it locally. I know this from a researcher that I spoke to who works between Cambridge and the UAE. To work with the UAE healthy future study data, she’s given a laptop by the University (NYU Abu Dhabi), and she must be connected to a VPN. While she while connected to the VPN, she’s using a secure platform called NYU-Box. I believe NYU uses this platform in all of its institutions; Shanghai, Abu Dhabi. I have been told that it is very secure and you can use it offline as well.  

Regarding the Qatar Biobank, I don’t know much about the data security measures of Qatar Biobank. Through my experiences, I only know about trying to get that data. They are willing to work with foreign institutions, which is good, but the main PI of the project must be based in Qatar and the analysis must be conducted in Qatar. However, I think going through that effort and that process is very much worth it because it has one of the most comprehensive data sources in all of the Middle East that is available in recent times. It was established around 2014 and they have now up to 47,000 participants and counting. 30,000 of them are Qatar nationals and around 17,000 are foreign nationals who are long term residents. You have people from various populations which includes participants who are Indian, Egyptian, Lebanese. So, you can get to look at migrant workers, you get to look at other Arabs that are living in a specific environment, meaning that you can parse genetics out of social and physical environments. There is so much you can do and in addition to that, what makes it special, for my PhD at least, is that they have treadmill data. This is where they put people through a treadmill around treadmill test and they look at their heart rate response to exercise instead of just going through self-reported physical activity or through wearables. The Qatar biobank is the only study in that region that actually uses heart rate data so we can definitely estimate fitness in that population. For this reason, it is very much worth the effort of trying to push for it.

One thing I am grappling with at the moment is policy development, which is a bit of a departure from data. On one end, I’m gathering the evidence in order to understand the different populations of the world through physical activity to look at the different trends in fitness. Then, once we have the physical activity data, how do we know which resources to allocate to? Who should we target so fitness can tell us that in terms of policy? Who needs it the most might not necessarily be in the volume of activity. – Abdulwahab Alshallal

On the difference between self-reported fitness data and objective data

LO: Are self-reported fitness data less valuable than objective data obtained from wearables? 

AA: It is important to understand that for a long time, it was difficult to get objective data. If you spoke to a researcher from 30 or 40 years ago telling them about a cohort study that would be using wearables, they would not believe you and they wouldn’t think it would be scalable and they think it would be too expensive, and so self-reported data was the only resource that we had. Also, there are downsides to data from wearables. For example, there is going to be noise and glitches with data obtained from accelerometry. So, I wouldn’t say that self-reported data is useless.

I am a big critic of self-reported data and the dependence of the literature on self-reported data and my supervisor has made mellow about it by reminding me that it gives you context. One of the things that we haven’t been able to overcome with accelerometry is knowing what is actually happening. We can tell that they are being active, but what are they doing? When are they doing it? For example, in the questionnaires (that are used to generate self-reported data), we don’t ask people when they leave work or when they start work or commuting, we ask them to estimate their physical strain while doing those things in those specific contexts. This removes from the researcher the burden of trying to estimate what activity is happening. 

In terms of accuracy of the numbers and their influence on policy? That is a good question, and I think accelerometry would answer those questions. Using wearables and attaining objective data, in terms of specific numbers, is much more valuable. But policies in the past are not necessarily based on numbers, and self-reports have benefited us and there is still continued benefit. It is about data points which have a degree of relativity. There are people who are going to misreport because they don’t remember accurately how much activity they were doing, or they might be lying because they feel self-conscious or they want people to think that they are more active, or there might be a recall bias or a social desirability bias which could all lead to misclassifications. We asked for moderate and vigorous activity, but what is moderate to me and light to you? It’s different and relative. While there are accuracy problems in self-reported data, for the most part it tells us something that is relative to people. Take for example someone who reports 30 minutes of activity throughout the whole week versus someone who is reporting 200 or 300 minutes of physical activity per week. We could tell that the person who was reporting the more minutes of activity is more likely to be someone who’s more physically active. It’s going to be aligned more with a better blood profile than the person reporting less activity and so in terms of a relative sense, it is helpful. But having the resources that we have now and the ability to use wearable data, we should be making a transition towards that, but self-reported data still has value. I think they can compliment each other and provide context for the type of activity that you’re doing. 

On data and policy making

AA: One thing I am grappling with at the moment is policy development, which is a bit of a departure from data. On one end, I’m gathering the evidence in order to understand the different populations of the world through physical activity to look at the different trends in fitness. Then, once we have the physical activity data, how do we know which resources to allocate to? Who should we target so fitness can tell us that in terms of policy? Who needs it the most might not necessarily be in the volume of activity. For example, we may have some barriers to fitness such as environmental factors like heat and humidity, also infrastructure factors such as pedestrian access, green spaces, and how these are different in different parts of the world. But how can we use these data to influence policy development? This is something I’m starting to understand and trying to get a grip on. Soon, I will begin a policy internship so I will hopefully learn more about that. I’ve had some conversations with people in physical activity policy, and I’ve learned that in terms of what would actually influence policy, I should be looking for a shared problem and the shared solution. Take for example, cycling lanes. Say you want to create more cycling lanes, but then the government says they don’t have enough money for cycling lanes so they decide against it. But then, you also have a congestion problem and you want to achieve net zero, and you also have an obesity problem. You know what can fix that? Cycling lanes. More cycling lanes means more people are going to be actively commuting and less cars on the road, so there will be less carbon. Then, they will be interested to get on board. So it’s about framing it and that’s what I’ve realized, because framing it in terms of health is not going to take you very far. But in terms of money, or the overall goal, matching them up is going to be helpful. And it’s quite a departure from the way that I’ve been doing things which is being driven by data and what is good for health.

We thank Abdulwahab for speaking with us. We are certainly excited to see how he gets on with policy making. It would be comforting to know that there is a data driven thinker in the world of policy making, especially one that is aware of, and takes into consideration, the contextual, environmental and behavioural differences of people in different communities and parts of the world when integrating data into public health policy decisions

Data Diversity Podcast (#4) – Dr Stefania Merlo (2/2)

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We return with another post featuring our Data Diversity conversation with University of Cambridge Data Champion, archaeologist Dr Stefania Merlo from the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, the Remote Sensing Digital Data Coordinator and project manager of the Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) project and coordinator of the Metsemegologolo project. This post is short in word count but not in importance, as it touches on two reflections on the challenges of data management as a researcher who works in a global context, two aspects of present-day academia that may be relevant to many readers. This edition follows on from the previous post where Stefania talks about the challenges of extending UK-based Open Data policies to non-UK communities that may not share the same enthusiasm for making their cultural heritage artefacts available Open Access.  

In this post, Stefania reflects on how she conducts herself as a European researcher working in the African continent where her intention may sometimes be misaligned with the local data co-creators. Stefania also shares the challenge of academic mobility, where migrating from one academic institution to another results in data that is left behind, provoking an uncomfortable thought: what would happen to your data when you are suddenly rendered uncontactable? 

One would like to think that this is a rare situation, but I suspect that the situation where somebody passes away unexpectedly or even not, or somebody retires and has not made a plan for what happens to an entire careers’ data set happens more often than we know. I think it is an individual’s responsibility to make plans, but I think support should be given by the institutions and people should be accompanied through this path. – Dr Stefania Merlo

Working in the African continent and being honest about the objectives of research 

Working in Africa and in African countries, gives somebody coming from a European background, and an Italian background like me, a particular set of challenges and opportunities, because you encounter a different set up with everything – with life, and with research. Living and working in this context in various African countries, allows a researcher coming from a different background to question and challenge themselves on how they do their work. Many things that are taken for granted in other settings cannot be taken for granted in that setting. In particular that relationship with the land, with nature, and with the past. Any archaeologist that works in this setting would tell you that there are certain things that you just know from very early on that you should do. For example, although we’re dealing with the past of archaeological landscapes, you don’t just go and do your work there without acknowledging that these landscapes come in spaces and areas occupied by people today, and that those people are the custodians of the land and of the archaeology today. So there needs to be a deep engagement with communities and with people even before you put your spade in the ground. And it takes time to build relationships of trust, and relationships that then allow you to do work on your own or together, depending on what the aim of your research is.

When I do work that fulfills certain academic goals that may not be of interest to the communities that I work with, I think it is better to be honest and tell them that I’m doing this piece of work because there is an archaeological question that probably only archaeologists are interested in, and this is the part of work that I’m doing. At the same time, I think it is also important then to acknowledge that you work in a setting that includes other people, and start thinking about what work you can do with the people that are custodians of or inhabit a particular part of the world. Then you start thinking, OK, there’s a different set of activities that I can do with people that people want to do with me and let’s do that. I think that it is important to have this honesty of saying that particular things are of interest to me and to my academic community that I would like to do, and then we can negotiate together. You have to engage with the community, and I think we should be a bit more honest and a bit more specific about what the expectations from both parties are, and from the setting, we’re coming and the setting we’re going to. 

There are certain academic activities that I’m expected to do that are of no interest whatsoever for the communities that I’m working with, such as the academic publications on which my career rests. Then, there are other things that the communities are interested in that will give me no weight whatsoever in my academic career but contribute to building a relationship with the local community. These give me so much fulfillment because I realise that I am doing research work that is useful not only for my academic community, but for other people, be it students, colleagues elsewhere in the world, or the building of policies around archaeological heritage. 

Global researcher, global data 

LO: As someone who has engaged in research all over the globe, how do you deal with data that is in various places around the world? 

SM: How do I deal with my data? – poorly. I may be a digital data champion, but it has been a difficult road, and it is still a difficult road, that of even managing and curating my own data. Just to give you an example, a lot of the data I’ve collected for the past 20 years is both in analog and digital format for the same project. I have some data with me here (in Cambridge) and I still have data backed up in hard drives that I haven’t opened in a long time. The majority of my analogue data sets, maps, drawings, diaries, I have left behind in South Africa when I moved here, and I haven’t been able to bring them with me. Some of my materials are in Italy with my family. Some of my diaries I had left back in Cambridge when I left to go to Botswana in 2006 and somehow got lost. So, it has been messy and I’m not proud of it. But I’m saying it because it is a problem with a lot of researchers that have become highly mobile and have migrated from one place to another, in some cases without sufficient funding to bring all of the paperwork with them. I have been a messy data collector, since my undergraduate and PhD days, and I’ve been trying to train myself to be better, I’m still not there yet, and in part it’s just me. But I think it has also to do with this very high mobility and having to change institutions in my career so many times. And what changed is not only the location, but the requirement of what you do with data where you put it, how you avail it to yourself and to others.

And so yes, I’m not very good at it but I’m trying very hard to find a way of now putting everything together because I do feel the responsibility that comes with collecting data in different countries. Some of it is actually information that was given to me from community members or friends, or colleagues that I work with and it’s with me. 
It’s their work, it’s with me and if anything ever happens to me – if I were to change institutions, or if anything were to happen to me, including losing my memory – let me put it like that – what’s going to happen? I’ve never really thought of what would happen if I were to move or to shift? I left my previous institution quite abruptly and during COVID, and I was able to take some materials out, but some other materials I didn’t get access to and they are still all over the place.  

And then I started thinking: I have never made a plan for this kind of situation to happen. So what am I going to do now in order to make sure that these data are usable and useful for me, but perhaps also to others when I’m not present as the curator that will be able to tell you what each data asset is. I’m not even talking about the creation of metadata. Most of my photographs, digital photographs, for example, have got metadata that have been ordered. But archaeological datasets are complex, fragmented and can be dispersed so the main challenge is how would you connect the photographs with the drawings within my diary? Of course, there are dates, but it’s going take so much time for somebody else to put all of it together, especially because half of it is in digital format and half of this is in analog format. That is going be a nightmare and may not even be doable. And so, I’ve become acutely aware of the fact that we never think of this situation. We rarely think about handing over data to others in a particular form that will allow others accessibility and ability to still reuse this complex interrelated data if they were to do so. 

Worst case (data) scenario

I have another example. One of my collaborators and mentors in South Africa passed away quite suddenly a couple of years ago. They had never made a plan for what would happen to their materials. They published prolifically, so we know a lot of the research that was done over 50 years, but I am aware that they had so much more material, both physical material and files in computers. Their physical collection was transferred from their house to the University by another colleague but, to the best of my knowledge, to date, no one has been able to get access to the digital data, stored in a password protected computer. One would like to think that this is a rare situation, but I suspect that the situation where somebody passes away unexpectedly or even not, or somebody retires and has not made a plan for what happens to an entire career’s data set happens more often than we know. I think it is an individual’s responsibility to make plans, but I think support should be given by the institutions and people should be accompanied through this path. In particular, perhaps academics from other generations that may not be so knowledgeable about how to deal with data management. In particular of digital data, but also of analog data. 

Once upon a time, archaeologists used to just put everything into a library or an archive so at least we have the analog records. But again, putting them together and having them make sense is extremely difficult if we don’t think of a framework for doing so. Another issue that I’ve mentioned before is mobility. You know, how do we assist researchers that have got high mobility to deal with this every time they move? I don’t have an exact formula, but when I changed institutions before, both the institution that I was leaving and the ones that were accepting me, I was never asked ‘do you need any financial or other kind of help to transfer your data?’ I was asked to fill in forms for transferring my goods, I was given money for my visa, but nobody ever asked about my academic research and the related data. 

We once again thank Stefania for taking the time to speak to us and giving us food for thought. Stefania raises, we believe, a very important question – are we taking for granted that we will always be at hand to ensure that the data that we produce will be understood? Researchers tend to wait until a project is completed before supplying their data with the information needed to make them understood and reusable. If there’s one thing that Stefania brings to mind, is that data FAIR-ness needs to be implemented from the onset of a project and then at every juncture of the project’s lifecycle, as the research unfolds. That way, the research data will be reusable in a self-contained manner. 

The Research Data Sustainability Workshop – November 2024

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The rapid advance of computing and data centres means there is an increasing amount of generated and stored research data worldwide, leading to an emerging awareness that this may have an impact on the environment. Wellcome have recently published their Environmental sustainability policy, which stipulates that any Wellcome funded research projects must be conducted in an environmentally sustainable way. Cancer Research UK have also updated their environmental sustainability in research policy and it is anticipated that more funders will begin to adopt similar policies in the near future. 

In November we held our first Research Data Sustainability Workshop in collaboration with Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUP&A). The aim was to address some of the areas common to researchers with a focus on how research data can impact the environment. The workshop was attended by Cambridge Data Champions and other interested researchers at the University of Cambridge. This blog summarises some of the presentations and group activities that took place at the workshop to help us to better understand the impact that processing and storing data can have on the environment and identify what steps researchers could take in their day-to-day research to help minimise their impact.  

The Invisible Cost to Storing Data 

Our first speaker at the workshop was Dr Loïc Lannelongue, Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. Loïc leads on the Green Algorithms initiative which aims to promote more environmentally sustainable computational science and has developed an online calculator to check computational carbon footprint. Loïc suggested that the aim is not that we shouldn’t have data, as we all use computing, just that we should be more aware of the work we do and the impact it has on the environment so we can make informed choices. Loïc emphasised that computing is not free, even though it might look like that to the end user. There is an invisible cost to storing data, whilst the exact costs are largely unknown, the estimates calculated for data centres suggest that they emit around 126mt of CO2 e/year. Loïc furthered explained that there are many more aspects to the footprint than just greenhouse gas emissions such as water use, toxicity, land use, minerals, metals and human toxicity. For example, there is a huge amount of water consumption needed to cool data centres, and you often find that cheaper data centres tend to use larger amounts of water. 

Loïc continued to discuss how there are a wide range of carbon footprints in research with some datasets having a large footprint. The estimate for storing data is ~10kg CO2 per tb per year, although there are many varying factors that could affect this figure. Loïc pointed out that the bottom line is – don’t store useless data! He suggested we shouldn’t stop doing research, we just have to do it better. Incentivising and addressing sustainability in Data Management Plans from the outset of projects could help. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is predicted to help to combat the impact on the environment in the future, although as AI comes at a large environmental cost, whether any benefit will outweigh the impact is still unknown. Loic has written a paper on the Ten simple rules to make your computing more sustainable, and he recommends looking at the Green DiSC Certification which is a free, open-access roadmap for anyone working in research (dry lab) to learn how to be more sustainable.

The Shift to Digital Publishing 

Next to present was Andri Johnston, Digital Sustainability Lead at CUP&A. Andri discussed how her role was newly created to address the carbon footprint within the digital publishing environment at CUP&A. In publishing, there has been a shift from print to digital, but after publishing digitally, what can be done to make it more sustainable? CUP&A are committed to being carbon zero by 2048, aiming for a 72% reduction by 2030. As 43% of all their digital emissions for the wider technology sector come from digital products such as software, CUP&A have been looking at how they can create their digital products more sustainably. They have been investigating methods to calculate digital emissions by looking at their hardware and cloud hosting, which is mostly Amazon Web Services (AWS) but they use some Cambridge data centres. Andri explained how it has been hard to find information on AWS data centres emissions and knowing whether your users use a fixed line or cellular internet network connection (some cellular network towers use backup diesel generators which have a higher environmental impact) is hard to pinpoint. AWS doesn’t supply accurate information on the emissions of using their services and Andri is fully aware that they are using data to get data!

Andri introduced the DIMPACT project (digital impact), where they are using the DIMPACT tool to report and better understand the carbon emissions of platforms serving digital media products. Carbon emissions of the academic publishing websites at CUP&A have reduced in the last year as the team looked at where they can make improvements. At CUP&A, they want to publish more and allow more to access their content globally, but this needs to be done in a sustainable way to not increase the websites’ carbon emissions. The page weight of web pages is also something to consider; heavy web pages due to media such as videos can be difficult to download for people in areas with low bandwidth so this needs to be taken into account when designing them. The Sustainable web design guide for 2023 has been produced with Wholegrain Digital, and can be downloaded for free. Andri mentioned that in the future they need to be aware of the impact of AI as it is becoming a significant part of publishing and academia and will increase energy consumption. 

Andri concluded by summarising that in academic publishing, they will always be adding more content such as videos and articles for download. It is likely that researchers may need to report on the carbon impact of research in the future, but the question on how best to do this is still to be decided. The impact of downloaded papers is also a question that the industry is struggling with, for example how many of these papers are read and stored. 

Digital Preservation: Promising for the Environment and Scholarship  

Alicia Wise who is Executive Director at CLOCKSS gave us an overview of the infrastructure in place to preserve scholarship for the long-term. This is vital to be able to reliably refer to research from the past. Alicia explained that there is an awareness to consider sustainability during preservation. When print publishing was the main research output, preservation was largely taken care of by librarians, in a digital world this is now undertaken by digital archives such as CLOCKSS. The plan is to prepare to archive research for future generations 200-500 years from now!

CLOCKSS was founded in the 1990’s to solve the problem of digital preservation. There is a now a growing collection of digitally archived books, articles, data, software and code. CLOCKSS consists of 12 mirror repository sites located across the world, all of which contain the same copies. The 12 sites are in constant communication, using network self-healing to restore the original if a problem is detected. CLOCKSS currently store 57.5 million journal articles and 530,500 books.  

CLOCKSS are a dark archive, this means they don’t provide access unless it is needed, such as when a publisher goes out of business, or a repository goes down. If this happens, the lost material is made open access. CLOCKSS have been working with the DIMPACT project to map and calculate their carbon footprint. They have looked at the servers at all their 12 repository sites to estimate the environmental impact. It became clear that not all their sites are equal. The best was their site at Stanford University, where the majority of the CLOCKSS machines are located. Stanford has a high renewable energy profile, largely due to their climate and even have their own a solar power plant! They also have a renewable, recirculating, chilled underground water system for cooling the servers. The site at Indiana University was their worst performing as this is supplied by 70% coal. The estimated carbon emissions at the Indiana University site is estimated to be 9 tonnes of carbon per month (equivalent to a fleet of 20 petrol cars). 

Alicia explained that most of the carbon emissions come from the integrity checking (self-healing network). CLOCKSS mission is to reduce the emissions, and they are looking into whether reducing the number of repository sites to 6 copies could still predict preservation will be available in 500 years’ time. They are reviewing what they need to keep and informing publishers of their contribution so they can consider this impact.  

Alicia summarised by saying that it appears that digital preservation may have a lower carbon footprint than print preservation. CLOCKSS are working with the Digital Preservation Coalition to help other digital archives reduce their footprint too (with DIMPACT), they are finalising a general tool for calculation of emissions that can be used by other archives. They don’t want to discourage long-term preservation, as currently, 25% of academic journals are not preserved anywhere. This risks access to scholarship in the future. They want to encourage preservation, but in an environmentally friendly way. 

Preserving for the future at the University of Cambridge 

There are many factors that could impact data remaining accessible now and over time. Digital Preservation maintains the integrity of digital files and ensures ongoing access to content for as long as necessary. Caylin Smith, Head of Digital Preservation at Cambridge University Libraries, gave an overview of the CUL Digital Preservation Programme that is changing how the Libraries manages its digital collection materials to ensure they can be accessed for teaching, learning, and research. These include the University’s research outputs in a wide range of content types and formats; born-digital special collections, including archives; and digitised versions of print and physical collection items.  

Preserving and providing access to data, as well as using cloud services and storing multiple copies of files and metadata, all impact the environment.  Monitoring usage of cloud services and appraising the content are two ways of working towards more responsible Digital Preservation. Within the Programme, the team is delivering a Workbench, which is a web user interface for curatorial staff to undertake collection management activities, including appraising files and metadata deposited to archives.  This work will help confirm that any deposited files, whether these are removed from a storage carrier or securely uploaded, must be preserved long term. Curatorial staff will also be alerted to any potential duplicate files, export metadata for creating archival records, and create an audit trail of appraisal activities before the files are moved to the preservation workflow and storage.  

Within the University Library, where the Digital Preservation team is based, there may be additional carbon emissions from computers kept on overnight to run workflows and e-waste (some of the devices that become obsolete may still have a use for reading data from older carriers e.g. floppy disk drives). Caylin explained that CUL pays for the cloud services and storage used by the Digital Preservation infrastructure, which means you can scale up and scale down as needed. They are considering whether there is a need for an offline backup and weighing up if the benefit to having such a backup would outweigh costs and energy consumption.  

Caylin discussed what they and other researchers could do to reduce the impact on the environment: use tools available to estimate personal carbon footprint and associated costs of research; minimise access to data where necessary to minimise use of computing. Ideally data centres and cloud computing suppliers should have green credentials so researchers can make informed choices. There is a choice to make between using second hand equipment and repair equipment where possible. At Cambridge we have the Research Cold Store which is low energy as it uses tapes and robots to store dark data, but the question remains as to whether this is really more energy efficient in the long term.   

What could help reduce the impact of research data on the environment? 

The afternoon session at the workshop involved group work to discuss two extreme hypothetical mandated scenarios for research data preservation. It allowed the pros and cons of each scenario to be addressed, how this could impact sustainability and problems that could arise. We will use the information gathered in this group session to consider what is possible right now to help researchers at the University of Cambridge make informed choices for research data sustainability. Some of the suggestions that could reduce research data storage (and carbon footprint) include improving documentation and metadata of files, regularly appraising files as part of weekly tasks and making data open to prevent duplication of research. It could also be helpful to address environmental sustainability at the start of projects such as in a Data Management Plan.  

We have learned in this workshop, that research data can have an environmental impact and as computing capabilities expand, this impact is likely to increase in the future. There are now tools available to help estimate research carbon footprints. We also need stakeholders (e.g. publishers, funders) to work together to advocate that relevant companies provide transparent information so researchers can make informed choices on managing their research data more sustainably.  

Data Diversity Podcast (#4) – Dr Stefania Merlo (1/2) 

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Welcome back to the fourth instalment of Data Diversity, the podcast where we speak to Cambridge University Data Champions about their relationship with research data and highlight their unique data experiences and idiosyncrasies in their journeys as a researcher. In this edition, we speak to Data Champion Dr Stefania Merlo from the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, the Remote Sensing Digital Data Coordinator and project manager of the Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) project and coordinator of the Metsemegologolo project. This is the first of a two-part series and in this first post, Stefania shares with us her experiences of working with research data and outputs that are part of heritage collections, and how her thoughts about research data and the role of the academic researcher have changed throughout her projects. She also shares her thoughts about what funders can do to ensure that research participants, and the data that they provide to researchers, can speak for themselves.   

This is the first of a two-part series and in this first post, Stefania shares with us her experiences of working with research data and outputs that are part of heritage collections, and how her thoughts about research data and the role of the academic researcher have changed throughout her projects. She also shares her thoughts about what funders can do to ensure that research participants, and the data that they provide to researchers, can speak for themselves.   

I’ve been thinking for a while about the etymology of the word data. Datum in Latin means ‘given’. Whereas when we are collecting data, we always say we’re “taking measurements”. Upon reflection, it has made me come to a realisation that we should approach data more as something that is given to us and we hold responsibility for, and something that is not ours, both in terms of ownership, but also because data can speak for itself and tell a story without our intervention – Dr Stefania Merlo

Data stories (whose story is it, anyway?) 

LO: How do you use data to tell the story that you want to tell? To put it another way, as an archaeologist, what is the story you want to tell and how do you use data to tell that story?

SM: I am currently working on two quite different projects. One is Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (funded by Arcadia) which is funded to create an Open Access database of information on endangered archaeological sites and monuments in Africa. In the project, we define “endangered” very broadly because ultimately, all sites are endangered. We’re doing this with a number of collaborators and the objective is to create a database that is mainly going to be used by national authorities for heritage management. There’s a little bit less storytelling there, but it has more to do with intellectual property: who are the custodians of the sites and the custodians of the data? A lot of questions are asked about Open Access, which is something that the funders of the projects have requested, but something that our stakeholders have got a lot of issues with. The issues surround where the digital data will be stored because currently, it is stored in Cambridge temporarily. Ideally all our stakeholders would like to see it stored in a server in the African continent at the least, if not actually in their own country. There are a lot of questions around this. 

The other project stems out of the work I’ve been doing in Southern Africa for almost the past 20 years, and is about asking how do you articulate knowledge of the African past that is not represented in history textbooks? This is a history that is rarely taught at university and is rarely discussed. How do you avail knowledge to publics that are not academic publics? That’s where the idea of creating a multimedia archive and a platform where digital representations of archaeological, archival, historical, and ethnographic data could be used to put together stories that are not the mainstream stories. It is a work in progress. The datasets that we deal with are very diverse because it is required to tell a history in a place and in periods for which we don’t have written sources.  

It’s so mesmerizing and so different from what we do in contexts where history is written. It gives us the opportunity to put together so many diverse types of sources. From oral histories to missionary accounts with all the issues around colonial reports and representations of others as they were perceived at the time, putting together information on the past environment combining archaeological data. We have a collective of colleagues that work in universities and museums. Each performs different bits and pieces of research, and we are trying to see how we would put together these types of data sets. How much do we curate them to avail them to other audiences? We’ve used the concept of data curation very heavily, and we use it purposefully because there is an impression of the objectivity of data, and we know, especially as social scientists, that this just doesn’t exist. 

I’ve been thinking for a while about the etymology of the word data. Datum in Latin means ‘given’. Whereas when we are collecting data, we always say we’re taking measurements. Upon reflection, it has made me come to a realisation that we should approach data more as something that is given to us and we hold responsibility for, and something that is not ours, both in terms of ownership, but also because data can speak for itself and tell a story without our intervention. That’s the kind of thinking surrounding data that we’ve been going through with the project. If data are given, our work is an act of restitution, and we should also acknowledge that we are curating it. We are picking and choosing what we’re putting together and in which format and framework. We are intervening a lot in the way these different records are represented so that they can be used by others to tell stories that are perhaps of more relevance to us. 

So there’s a lot of work in this project that we’re doing about representation. We are explaining – not justifying but explaining – the choices that we have made in putting together information that we think could be useful to re-create histories and tell stories. The project will benefit us because we are telling our own stories using digital storytelling, and in particular story mapping, but it could become useful for others as resources that can be used to tell their own stories. It’s still a work in progress because we also work in low resourced environments. The way in which people can access digital repositories and then use online resources is very different in Botswana and in South Africa, which are the two countries where I mainly work with in this project. We also dedicate time into thinking how useful the digital platform will be for the audiences that we would like to get an engagement from. 

The intended output is an archive that can be used in a digital storytelling platform. We have tried to narrow down our target audience to secondary school and early university students of history (and archaeology). We hope that the platform will eventually be used more widely, but we realised that we had to identify an audience to be able to prepare the materials. We have also realised that we need to give guidance on how to use such a platform so in the past year, we have worked with museums and learnt from museum education departments about using the museum as a space for teaching and learning, where some of these materials could become useful. Teachers and museum practitioners don’t have a lot of time to create their own teaching and learning materials, so we’re trying to create a way of engaging with practitioners and teachers in a way that doesn’t overburden them. For these reasons, there is more intervention that needs to come from our side into pre-packaging some of these curations, but we’re trying to do it in collaboration with them so that it’s not something that is solely produced by us academics. We want this to be something that is negotiated. As archaeologists and historians, we have an expertise on a particular part of African history that the communities that live in that space may not know about and cannot know because they were never told. They may have learned about the history of these spaces from their families and their communities, but they have learned only certain parts of the history of that land, whereas we can go much deeper into the past. So, the question becomes, how do you fill the gaps of knowledge, without imposing your own worldview? It needs to be negotiated but it’s a very difficult process to establish. There is a lot of trial and error, and we still don’t have an answer. 

Negotiating communities and funders 

LO: Have you ever had to navigate funders’ policies and stakeholder demands?  

SM: These kinds of projects need to be long and they need continuous funding, but they have outputs that are not always necessarily valued by funding bodies. This brings to the fore what funding bodies are interested in – is it solely data production, as it is called, and then the writing up of certain academic content? Or can we start to acknowledge that there are other ways of creating and sharing knowledge? As we know, there has been a drive, especially with UK funding bodies, to acknowledge that there are different ways in which information and knowledge is produced and shared. There are alternative ways of knowledge production from artistic ones to creative ones and everything in between, but it’s still so difficult to account for the types of knowledge production that these projects may have. When I’m reporting on projects, I still find it cumbersome and difficult to represent these types of knowledge production. There’s so much more that you need to do to justify the output of alternative knowledge compared to traditional outputs. I think there needs to be change to make it easier for researchers that produce alternative forms of knowledge to justify it rather than more difficult than the mainstream. 

One thing I would say is there’s a lot that we’ve learned with the (Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments) project because there we engage directly with the custodians of the site and of the analog data. When they realise that the funders of the project expect to have this data openly accessible, then the questions come and the pushback comes, and it’s a pushback on a variety of different levels. The consequence is that basically we still haven’t been able to finalise our agreements with the custodians of the data. They trust us, so they have informed us that in the interim we can have the data as a project, but we haven’t been able to come to an agreement on what is going to happen to the data at the end of the project. In fact, the agreement at the moment is the data are not going to be going on a completely Open Access sphere. The negotiation now is about what they would be willing to make public, and what advantages they would have as a custodian of the data to make part, or all, of these data public.

This has created a disjuncture between what the funders thought they were doing. I’m sure they thought they were doing good by mandating that the data needs to be Open Access, but perhaps they didn’t consider that in other parts of the world, Open Access may not be desirable, or wanted, or acceptable, for a variety of very valid reasons. It’s a node that we still haven’t resolved and it makes me wonder: when funders are asking for Open Access, have they really thought about work outside of UK contexts with communities outside of the UK context? Have they considered these communities’ rights to data and their right to say, “we don’t want our data to be shared”? There’s a lot of work that has happened in North America in particular, because indigenous communities are the ones that put forward the concept of C.A.R.E., but in UK we are still very much discussing F.A.I.R. and not C.A.R.E.. I think the funders may have started thinking about it, but we’re not quite there. There is still this impression that Open Data and Open Access is a universal good without having considered that this may not be the case. It puts researchers that don’t work in UK or the Global North in an awkward position. This is definitely something that we are still grappling with very heavily. My hope is that this work is going to help highlight that when it comes to Open Access, there are no universals. We should revisit these policies in light of the fact that we are interacting with communities globally, not only those in some countries of the world. Who is Open Access for? Who does it benefit? Who wants it and who doesn’t want it, and for what reasons? These are questions that we need to keep asking ourselves. 

LO: Have you been in a position where you had to push back on funders or Open Access requirements before? 

Not necessarily a pushback, but our funders have funded a number of similar projects in South Asia, in Mongolia, in Nepal and the MENA region and we have come together as a collective to discuss issues around the ethics and the sustainability of the projects. We have engaged with representatives of our funders trying to explain that what they wanted initially, which is full Open Access, may not be practicable. In fact, there has already been a change in the terminology that is used by the funders. From Open Access, they changed the concept to Public Access, and they have come back to us to say that they can change their contractual terms to be more nuanced and acknowledge the fact that we are in negotiation with national stakeholders and other stakeholders about what should happen to the data. Some of this has been articulated in various meetings, but some of it was trial and error on our side. In other words, with our new proposal for renewal of funding, which was approved, we just included these nuances in the proposal and in our commitment and they were accepted. So in the course of the past four years, through lobbying of the funded projects, we have been able to bring nuance to the way in which the funders themselves think about Open Access. 

Stay tuned for part two of this conversation where Stefania will share some of the challenges of managing research data that are located in different countries!

Enriching the institutional scholarly record: Octopus outputs in repositories via Publications Router

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Written by Dr Alexandra Freeman, Tim Fellows, Dr Agustina Martínez-García

Researchers at universities across the country are constantly being reminded that when they publish work in journals (or elsewhere) they have to deposit the accepted version of their article in their university’s repository as well. It ensures that this version of the article can be made freely available to the world (so-called ‘Green Open Access’) but also allows the university to keep track of their researchers’ outputs, including reporting to the all-important REF (Research Excellence Framework) exercise that takes place every few years and helps determine future government funding to each institution. It’s important that researchers deposit their works, but time-consuming for everyone involved.

In order to help automate this process, a service called Publications Router takes information from journals and other traditional academic content providers and automatically passes it along to current research information systems (CRISs), repositories, and other relevant institutional systems based upon the affiliations of each article’s authors. But Publications Router did not serve the needs of more innovative alternative publishing platforms, meaning that universities were not automatically being notified of works published on these platforms. Given that these tend to be Open Access publications, their loss to the REF assessment exercise (which counts the proportion of Open Access publications from each institution), is vital.

Thanks to the support of the Arcadia fund, the open research platform Octopus.ac is now the first alternative publishing platform integrated with Publications Router.

Octopus is designed to sit alongside journals as the place where researchers share their work in full detail. Instead of publishing a ‘paper’, Octopus allows researchers to share their work as a series of small, interconnected publications that each represent a different stage of the research process. This allows researchers to follow best practice in research, such as publishing a method before it is carried out, and to allow others to carry out linked research (such as an alternative analysis of data, or a replication of a method).

The institution that drove forward the integration was the University of Cambridge. When a Cambridge-affiliated researcher publishes their work on Octopus, a copy of the publication – along with key metadata – is now directed to Cambridge’s institutional repository, Apollo, via Publications Router.

As the structure of Octopus’ publications is different from that of a traditional research paper, one of the key challenges has been how Octopus can integrate with existing research systems designed around the traditional formats. With that issue now solved, Octopus publications can much more easily be formally recognised as part of a researcher’s academic record.

Whilst the integration has been developed by Octopus and Cambridge, it has been built to allow other institutions who use Publications Router to take advantage of it, meaning the feature is now available to numerous institutions across the UK. The integration reuses and adapts existing infrastructure, i.e. Publications Router, and increases interoperability between innovative research publishing tools like Octopus, while at the same time, it removes barriers to depositing research outputs into research repositories. More so, it provides key benefits to researchers and institutions:

  • By depositing Octopus outputs into repositories, we add redundancy to ensure that additional copies will be accessible and preserved long-term.
  • The integration helps institutions tracking the impact of their research and keeping an accurate scholarly record.
  • The integration facilitates funder compliance and institutional reporting as information about Octopus outputs is made available to institutional research information systems in an automated manner.

Find out more about this integration at https://research.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/01/16/octopus-is-now-delivering-records-via-publications-router/

5000 datasets now in Apollo

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Written by Clair Castle, Dr Kim Clugston, Dr Lutfi Bin Othman, Dr Agustina Martínez-García. 

 How the ‘second life’ of datasets is impacting the research world. Researchers share their stories.

“Research data is the evidence that underpins all research findings. It’s important across disciplines: arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEMM. Preserving and sharing datasets, through Apollo, advances knowledge across research, not only in Cambridge, but across the world – furthering Cambridge’s mission for society and our mission as a national research library.”

Dr Jessica Gardner, University Librarian & Director of Library Services

The research data produced and collected during research takes many different forms: numerical data, digital images, sound recordings, films, interview transcripts, survey data, artworks, texts, musical scores, maps, and fieldwork observations. Apollo collects them all.  

Apollo is the University of Cambridge repository for research datasets. Managed by the Research Data team at Cambridge University Library, Apollo stores and preserves the University’s research outputs.  

The Research Data team guides researchers through all aspects of research data management – how to plan, create, organise, curate and share research materials, whatever form they take – and assists researchers in meeting funders’ expectations and good research practice.  

In this blog post, upon reaching our 5000 datasets milestone, we share researcher stories about the impact their datasets have had, and continue to have, across research – and explain how researchers at the University can benefit from depositing their datasets on Apollo.

“Sharing data propels research forward. It recognises the importance of the original datasets in their own right, and the researchers who worked on them. Many of the research funders, supporting work at the University of Cambridge, require that research data is made openly available with as few restrictions as possible. Our researchers are fully supported to do this with Apollo and the Research Data team. I’m really excited that Apollo has reached the 5000 dataset milestone.” 

Professor Sir John Aston, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge 

Why should researchers share their research outputs on a repository?  

Making research data openly available is recognised as an important aspect of research integrity and in recent years has garnered support from funders, publishers and researchers. Open data supports the FAIR principles and many funders now include data sharing practices within their policies as part of the application process. Publishers and funders often require a data availability statement (DAS) to be included in publications. It is worth mentioning (including in a DAS) that there are situations where data cannot be shared, particularly if data contains personal or sensitive information or where there is no permission to share it. But a lot of data can be shared and this movement towards open data promotes greater trust, both among researchers and for engagement with the general public.   

Illustration of why it is good to share research data. The illustration is explained in the text of the blog immediately below.

In the UK, funding bodies often mandate openly sharing the data supporting their research grants. A large proportion of funding for research is from taxpayers’ money or charity donations so making data available openly for reuse provides value for money. It also allows the data behind claims to be accessed for traceability, transparency and reproducibility. Open data increases efficiency, as it prevents work being repeated that may have already been done; for this reason, it is encouraged to publish negative results too. Publishing data gives researchers credit for the work they have done, giving them more visibility in their field, and increasing the discoverability of their research which could lead to potential collaborations and increased citations. Open data also means that researchers have access to valuable datasets that could educate, enhance and further their research when applied by practitioners worldwide.  

The second life of data   

Apollo supports data from all disciplines, and this is represented by the various formats that the repository holds in its collection –  from movie files, images, audio recordings, or code, to the more common text and CSV files. The repository now also hosts methods. Researchers are encouraged to deposit these outputs onto the repository to facilitate the impact and re-use of data underlying their research, so that their research data can be cited as a form of scholarly output in their own right. In 2023, there were over 95,000 views of datasets and software and associated metadata items on Apollo, and over 37,000 files were downloaded (source: IRUS). This proves that datasets and software deposited on Apollo are easy to discover and are highly used.  

One example is a dataset deposited by Douglas Brion at the end of his PhD in the Engineering department. Brion’s dataset, titled Data set for “Generalisable 3D printing error detection and correction via multi-head neural networks” has been downloaded 2,600 times. This dataset has also been featured in 20 online news publications (including in the University’s Research blog) and has an Altmetric attention score of 151. Brion’s dataset is also one of the larger outputs on Apollo, comprising over 1.2 million labelled images and over 900,000 pre-filtered images.   

The open availability of Brion’s data that can be used to train AI (a significant trajectory for research currently) is welcomed by researchers such as AI specialist Bill Marino, a PhD candidate and Data Champion from the Department of Computer Science and Technology: “It’s really important that AI researchers are able to reproduce each other’s findings. The opaque nature of some of today’s AI models means that access to data is a key ingredient of AI reproducibility. This effort really helps get us there.”   

Brion considers that sharing his data “has significantly enhanced the impact and reach” of his research and that “it has increased the visibility and credibility of my work, as other scientists can validate and build upon my findings.” On the benefits of depositing data on a repository, he says that sharing “ensures that the data is preserved and accessible for the long term, which is crucial for reproducibility and transparency in research”. He adds, “Repositories often provide metadata and tools that make it easier for other researchers to find and use the data”, which “promotes a culture of openness and collaboration, which can accelerate scientific discovery and innovation.”  

Photo of a researcher searching Apollo, the University of Cambridge repository, on a computer.

Research data supporting “Regime transitions and energetics of sustained stratified shear flows” is a dataset from another depositor, Adrien Lefauve, from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and consists of MATLAB codes and accompanying movies files. Lefauve is, in fact, a frequent dataset depositor with 10 datasets published in Apollo. He considers that data sharing gives his data “a second life” by allowing researchers to reuse his data in pursuit of new projects but admits that “there is also a selfish reason for doing it!”. He explains that “After several months or years without having worked on a dataset, I sometimes need to go back to it, either by myself or when I hand it over to a colleague or student to test new ideas. Having a well-structured, user-friendly and thoroughly documented dataset is invaluable and will save you a lot of time and frustration when you need to resurrect your own research.”  

Lefauve’s dataset has been cited in other publications and he encourages other researchers to look at his datasets and reuse them: “When people see that datasets can be cited in their own right and attract citations, it can encourage them to make the extra effort to deposit their data”. Lefauve is an advocate for sharing data on a repository and in his view data sharing is: “not only important for research integrity and reproducibility, but it also ensures that research funds are used efficiently. My datasets are usually from laboratory experiments which can take a lot of time and resources to perform. Hence, I feel there is a duty to ensure the data can be used to the fullest by the community. It also helps build a researcher’s profile and credentials as a valuable contributor to the community, beyond simply publication output, which often only use a small fraction of a dataset.”  

Lefauve describes his field (fluid mechanics) as one that has benefited from the explosion of open data that is made available to the research community, but he is also aware that for a dataset to be reused, it requires comprehensive documentation and curation. Lefauve hopes that sharing data in a repository “will become increasingly commonplace as the next generation is taught that this is an essential part of data-intensive research.”  

How to deposit data on Apollo, and why choose Apollo 

There are thousands of data repositories to submit data to, so how to choose the right one? Funders may specify a disciplinary or institutional repository (see re3data.org for a directory of all repositories). Members of the University of Cambridge can deposit their data on the institutional repository, Apollo. Apollo has CoreTrustSeal certification, which means it has met the 16 requirements to be a sustainable and trustworthy infrastructure. Research outputs can be deposited as several types, such as dataset, code or method.  

We have a step by step guide to uploading a dataset, which is submitted through Symplectic Elements, the University’s research information management system. There is also a helpful information guide about Symplectic Elements on the Research Information Sharepoint site. The Research Data team are on hand to help researchers with any queries they might have during this process.    

The importance of good metadata  

Researchers may think that the files are the most important aspect when depositing a dataset, but we cannot emphasise enough the importance of providing good metadata (data about data) to go alongside the files. This is the area that we find researchers need some encouragement with, but we hope that the experiences of the researchers we have featured above highlight the importance that good metadata has for their data. No one knows their data better than the person who generated it, so they are in the best position to describe it. A good description of a dataset enables users with no prior knowledge about the dataset to be able to discover, understand and reuse the data correctly, avoiding misinterpretation, without having access to the paper it supports. Be aware that others may discover datasets in isolation from a paper that it supports: we recommend that researchers avoid referring to the paper or using the abstract of the paper to describe their dataset. An article abstract describes the contents of the article, not of the dataset. It can also be really useful for researchers to describe their methods and how their files are organised for example, by providing README files. These give the dataset context as to how the data was generated, collected and processed. Good metadata will also enhance a dataset’s discoverability.  

Another benefit of sharing data on Apollo is that our datasets are indexed on Google’s Dataset Search, a search engine for datasets. It is best practice to cite any datasets used in research in the bibliography/reference list of the paper, thesis etc. In fact, there is new guidance for Data Reuse on the Apollo website which describes how to use Apollo to discover research data and how to cite it. We advise that researchers start doing this now (if they don’t already) so they get into a good habit: it will encourage others to do the same and make it a lot easier for others to reuse data and for researchers to receive recognition for it. Citation data for datasets are displayed on Apollo and alongside this it is possible to track the attention that a dataset receives via an Altmetric Attention Score.   

Apollo repository key milestones  

Illustration of Apollo repository key milestones represented as a timeline. The illustration is explained in the text of the blog immediately below.

Since its inception in 2016, when it started minting DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), Apollo has continued to hit milestones and develop into the robust, safe and resilient repository infrastructure that it is today.  

Apollo has continued to support FAIR principles by incorporating new and critical functionality to further enhance discovery, access and long-term preservation of the University research outputs it holds. For example, integration with our CRIS (Current Research Information System), Symplectic Elements, to streamline the depositing process, and integration with JISC Publications Router to automatically deposit metadata-rich records in Apollo (2016, 2019, 2021).  

2000 datasets were deposited in Apollo by 2020. DOI versioning was enabled in 2023, as well as accepting more research output types than ever before, such as methods and pre-prints. A major milestone was hit in 2023 when Apollo achieved CoreTrustSeal certification and status as a trustworthy repository.  

The latest milestone will be for research outputs published within Octopus, a novel approach to publication, to be preserved together with associated publications and underpinning research datasets in Apollo to facilitate sharing and re-use (2024-25). In future we want to develop our ability to collect and interpret data citation statistics for Apollo so we can better assess the impact of the research data generated at the University.  

How we can support researchers  

The Research Data team is here to help!   

We can be contacted by email at info@data.cam.ac.uk. Researchers can also request a consultation with us to discuss any aspect of their research data management (RDM) needs, including data management plans, data storage and backup, data organisation, data deposition and sharing, funder data policies, or to request bespoke training.   

Remember that there is also an amazing network of Data Champions that can be called upon for advice, particularly from a disciplinary perspective.  

We deliver regular RDM training as part of the Research Skills Programme.   

Finally, there is our Research Data website for comprehensive advice and information.   

Flipping academic journals to diamond open access: Notes on community governance

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In this blog post, Dr Caroline Edwards, Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Culture, Birkbeck, University of London asks: How do we ensure that a flipped diamond open access journal can remain independent? How do we prepare for the long-term financial security of flipped journals and protect against their potential vulnerability to commercial acquisition in the decades to come?

Flipping academic journals to diamond open access (OA) presents a series of challenges to an academic publisher. You need certain niche competencies. Firstly, nothing happens without the complete trust of an editorial team that shares your appetite for risk. Then, you need the backing of an entire academic community, willing to follow the editorial team to a new journal (in cases where editors don’t own the journal IP, which is most cases) and undertake a boycott of the old “zombie” title. Underpinning all of this, you need the financial and technological resources to provide the necessary infrastructure for the flipped journal in perpetuity, to offer it a safe home with a long-term future that doesn’t require any author fees. This involves things like setting up and maintaining a new journal site, running a digital publishing platform for managing submission, review, and production processes, having the capacity to manage metadata integration with university library catalogues and discoverability databases, providing memberships at robust digital preservation organisations, and ongoing research and development to stay abreast of rapid changes within the digital publishing landscape. The list goes on.

The growing list of journals flipping to diamond OA from their commercial publishers is well known. Retraction Watch keeps an up-to-date list of editorial boards that have resigned from for-profit models and moved their titles to not-for-profit, community-governed models. Each has its own story, told across published statements, academic blogs, and in newspaper articles covering high-profile editorial resignations and academic boycotts. But what gets talked about less frequently is the community governance structure that will support the journal moving forwards. How do we ensure that a flipped journal can remain independent? How do we prepare for its long-term financial security and protect against future vulnerability to commercial acquisition in the decades to come?

At the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), I spend much of my time talking to editors about their journals. There is a depressingly common story. It usually goes something like this. Many academic journals were launched between the 1960s and 1980s, in a collaboration between university professors and small or independent publishing houses. Things worked pretty well until their small publisher was bought out in the 1990s or 2000s by a larger company, often overseen by a global parent company. They muddled along with a high turnover of staff on the publisher side. Over time, the publishing managers became harder to get hold of, production was outsourced overseas, and editors became increasingly aware of a decline in production quality. 

With the acceleration to open access in the 2010s, editors came under pressure to double or triple their article acceptance rates – with a drop in subscriptions revenue, commercial publishers had to recoup costs via article processing charges (APCs). The more volume they could pump out, the better their profit margins. Even when journal editors rejected unsuitable or poor-quality articles, publishers found a way to fast-track this academic content by surreptitiously channelling it through their digital platforms to their hundreds of other journals using the same platform. Not all editors were even aware that the transfer of rejected articles had taken place.

If the Editor(s)-in-Chief had the temerity to stand up for their academic principles and refuse to increase their journal’s article acceptance rates, at this point they could face legal challenges or dismissal. In several explosive cases in recent years, Editors-in-Chief have been fired by their commercial publishers after refusing to back down over these issues. Sacking an internationally renowned editor whose reputation has become synonymous with the journal’s own reputation isn’t for the faint-hearted. It says something about the desperation of commercial publishers and their shrinking profits that they would be willing to trash a journal’s reputation so comprehensively – among the very academic communities whose uncompensated labour produced that reputation in the first place.

At this point in my conversations with editors, I ask a difficult question: Who owns the journal? “The publisher” they say, or “we don’t know.” Sometimes they reply: “The founding editor has passed away; we’ve asked their children, but no one can find any paperwork.” Without the rights to the journal title, its name, and logo, editors must set up a new journal. Ensuring the continuity between the old (now trashed) journal title and the new journal title requires coordinating a mass resignation of editors and authors from the old journal, preferably along with a boycott by peer reviewers for the foreseeable future.

At the OLH we’ve spent almost a decade flipping academic journals to diamond OA, supported by a growing number of libraries worldwide who share our vision for a not-for-profit academic publishing future. It wasn’t called “diamond” when we launched in 2015, but the term has come to mean not-for-profit and community-governed OA. Our publishing model is inspired by an explicitly political project – if the OLH and similar university-owned journal publishers are to thrive, they need to divert university library funding away from the big 5 commercial publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer). This happens hand-in-hand with library advocacy. When expensive journals flip to diamond OA, librarians are empowered to cancel individual journal subscriptions. In the age of big bundles and journal packages, journal flipping allows them to renegotiate extortionate deals with commercial publishers in light of the shrinking number of titles in each package.

Since launching as a publisher in 2015, the OLH has flipped 20 journals in this way. It hasn’t always been easy, and we have learned a lot along the way. In cases where journals own their own intellectual property (IP), usually via a scholarly association or legal governing body, the process of migrating decades of back content requires highly complex, skilled technical work. In cases where journals don’t own their IP, editors are unable to take the journal title with them. In these cases, a new journal needs to be established to continue the mission of the original title. This leaves behind zombie journals; the undead husks of formerly respected titles, that commercial publishers refuse to close but cannot run when the entire scholarly community has agreed to boycott it. The case of Wiley’s Journal of Political Philosophy, which relaunched with the OLH as Political Philosophy in February 2024, is a case in point.

Some of the journals that the OLH has flipped to diamond OA have set up a nonprofit organisation to protect themselves. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, a former Wiley journal that dates back to 1966, was able to do this because the original editors had the foresight to protect their IP before their publisher Blackwell was taken over by Wiley in 2007 (the journal had previously been published by two different university presses, the University of Chicago Press (1966–1978) and Wilfrid Laurier University Press (1979–1989)). The Zygon editorial team set up its own not-for-profit scholarly corporation in Chicago in 2019, following a joint venture established in 1965 among founding partners. As a 501(c)(3) organization, the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science NFP not-for-profit scholarly corporation is a charitable organisation exempt from federal income tax. This route is being taken by other OLH journals including Theory & Social Inquiry (formerly Theory & Society), Political Philosophy (formerly the Journal of Political Philosophy), and Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs (formerly Philosophy & Public Affairs).

Several of the OLH’s journals have been owned by scholarly associations since their inception, including Quaker Studies (founded by the Quaker Studies Research Association (QSRA)), Architectural Histories (founded by the European Architectural History Network (EAHN)), Digital Studies / Le champ numérique (founded by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN), Marvell Studies (founded by the Andrew Marvell Society), Open Screens (founded by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)), and The Parish Review (founded by the International Flann O’Brien Society).

In other cases, independent journals joining the OLH have made the decision to affiliate themselves with scholarly societies. This has been the case for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, which has become the official video essay journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which became the official journal of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) when the new association was founded in 2017. This kind of affiliation secures the community governance of journals. Scholarly associations have articles of association that usually include the criteria for appointing journal editors, terms of office, and processes for collectively undertaking decisions about the journal’s functioning and health. 

Another route to long-term protection against commercial acquisition is for journals to join forces. This was the approach taken by 3 of the OLH’s journals who resigned en masse from Elsevier in 2015 – Lingua (which relaunched as Glossa), LabPhon, and the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. Editors of these titles set up a community organisation, LingOA: Linguistics in Open Access as a Dutch Stichting (literally a “foundation”), a not-for-profit legal entity with limited liability similar to a trust, which is controlled by a board of directors and cannot have any shareholders. 

With support from the Center of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Leiden, Radboud University Library, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), LingOA was able to provide financial support for the journals beyond their funding agreement with the OLH. One of the OLH’s newest journals, Syntactic Theory and Research (STAR, which left Wiley) has also joined the LingOA Stichting.

Other journals that have joined the OLH in 2023-2024 will need to establish their own legal and ownership entities, and we continue to offer help and advice to editorial teams undertaking this important work. Our goal at the OLH is to liberate university research from commercial control. Flipping journals to diamond OA is the first step; enshrining community governance is the crucial next step. As more funding bodies mandate diamond OA and not-for-profit academic publishing infrastructure (such as this recent announcement by the NWO), the tide is turning against commercial actors. Now is the time for editors and scholarly communities to regain control of their scholarship.

This post does not necessarily reflect the view of Cambridge University Libraries.

Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (4/4)

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Thank you for staying with us throughout this four-part series with Dr Nick Wise, scientist and an engineer, who has made his name as a scientific sleuth. By now, it is hoped that he needs no introduction (though if you would like one, please look back at the previous posts).

In this final post, we get Nick’s take on what he thinks the repercussions should be for engaging in fraud, and we get a parting tip from Nick on what researchers should do when performing a literature search on papers in their field. Below are some excerpts from the conversation, which can be listened to in full here.

Most people don’t go into science wanting to fake stuff. With such cases, it can often be a sign that there’s a real problem in the lab or in the group. Why else would someone feel so compelled to do this? If the pressure is coming from the university demanding papers from them, then it’s the problem with the university. 

Repercussions for research fraud 

LO: You have mentioned that some editors have been let go from their positions as editors – are there any other repercussions for getting involved with fraud? 

NW: Often, institutions are the worst in terms of responding. Recently, I was at the World Conference on Research Integrity in Athens and spoke to other investigators like me, including publishers and people in the research integrity space. Some publishers have informed me that even when they want to make a retraction and have gone to the author’s or editor’s institution to inform them that a staff member has been involved with fraud, often the institution doesn’t reply at all, or even if they do, they will not do anything. They are very defensive, and they do not want any bad publicity for the institution and so they will not respond at all. Even in a well-regarded western University where someone has been caught fabricating their data, the response could just be that they have been relieved of teaching duties for six months, but they’ve kept their job and there will be no publicity that we know.  

In Spain, a professor that has just been made Rector, the Head of the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain, has been linked to questionable publication practices for the last decade or so. He was found to have his name on an incredible number of papers which have been cited an incredible number of times, including by people who don’t exist. There has been a fight in the Spanish press to try highlight this. But despite of all this press, including national press in Spain, this person has become the Rector of the University of Salamanca. And it’s basically the same the world over: institutions very much go into protection mode even if publishers have agreed on retracting the papers. Often there are no career repercussions at all. Sometimes, they will just go and be editor of a different journal or for a different publisher. 

LO: In your opinion, what should happen to an academic or researcher who has engaged in fraud? 

NW: I think it really depends on the nature of the fraud and the position that the researcher holds. If a PhD student has done something and if they have been caught after, say, the first offence, then I think there should be leniency. Regardless of if they have bought an authorship, or if they have tried to fake some data, they still have a way out and it should be offered to them. Again, a lot of the drive for PhD students faking some data is because their P.I. (Principal Investigator) is demanding results, demanding that things happen faster, or demanding ground-breaking results. At some point, people become desperate. Most people don’t go into science wanting to fake stuff. With such cases, it can often be a sign that there’s a real problem in the lab or in the group. Why else would someone feel so compelled to do this? If the pressure is coming from the university demanding papers from them, then it’s the problem with the university. A lot of this drive is external to researchers. But if you have someone that is a tenured professor who has been doing this for a long time and they have been caught out on a decade or more of fabricated results, those feel like that should be the end of the road. It really depends on the nature of what has been done, the stage of career of the person, and how much fraud has been committed. 

LO: Do you ever worry about being called out for being sued for defamation? 

NW: I have thought about it, and I try to err on the side of caution and make sure that there is fairly hard evidence for anything I say publicly. You can have suspicions without saying anything publicly – you would just go to the publisher. But when I find an advert for a named paper and then six months later a paper with that same title is published, then it is clear cut that someone should investigate. But fortunately, so far, I have not been threatened with anything. 

I think it is also partly due to the fact that accusing people of making up their data is more personal. When authorship is bought, by the time I find it, some of these people would have already got what they needed. If they needed to have a publication in order to graduate, once they have graduated, they do not care if the publication is retracted. Often when you read a retraction notice after the authorship has been sold, they will normally say that none of the authors responded. This may also be down to the fact that they know that they have been caught but there is nothing to defend. But when you are accusing someone of making up data, I think that is far more personal attack. When someone has bought authorship, they do not have a personal connection to the paper, so they move on. They are probably annoyed, but they cannot do anything about it. 

Parting advice

LO: To end, are there any takeaways that you would like to share? 

 NW: I would encourage all researchers to download the PubPeer plugin, which means that whenever they are looking at a paper, it will flag whether there are any comments about that paper, or indeed any comments in the reference or the reference papers on PubPeer. If someone else has found a problem with that paper, they can just quickly go and check and be more informed. 

We are grateful for Dr Nick Wise sharing his perspective on the publishing industry and research culture that many of us are not privy to. Nick has highlighted many issues which raise pressing concerns for research integrity. We thank him for his time speaking with us and we hope that readers will take his advice on using PubPeer when they embark on literature searching (and of course, refrain from committing fraud, lest you will have Nick on your case).

Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (3/4)

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Welcome back to the penultimate post featuring Dr Nick H. Wise, Research Associate in Architectural Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. If you have been with us for the previous two posts, you would know that besides being a scientist and an engineer, Nick has made his name as a scientific sleuth who, based on an article on the blog Retraction Watch which was written in 2022, is responsible for more than 850 retractions, leading Times Higher Education to dub him as a research fraudbuster. Since then, through his X account @Nickwizzo, he has continued his investigations, tracking cases of fraud and in some cases, naming and shaming the charlatans. In this four-part series, we will learn from Nick about some of the shady activities that taint the scientific publishing industry today.

In part three, we learn from Nick about how researchers try to generate more citations from a single piece of research through a trick called ‘salami slicing’ and the blurred lines between illegality and desperately coping to meet with the unrealistic expectations of academia (to the point of engaging with fraud). Below are some excerpts from the conversation, which can be listened to in full here. 

Citation count was once a proxy for quality and now it is citation count regardless of quality. People are only looking at the citation count, and not the actual quality. Actually assessing quality takes a lot more effort. 

‘Salami slicing’ and the Game of Citations

LO: What do you think is better for science? A slower, more thoughtful process of publishing and everything in between? Or more information, more research, but then things like fraud slip through and occur more frequently?

NW: I don’t think there’s necessarily more research. Another phenomenon that paper mills take advantage of is salami slicing. Imagine you have completed a research project. Now you could write this up as one, thirty-page paper or two, twenty-page papers. You could write two comprehensive papers or try to put out multiple ten-page papers where you have some minor parameters changed. I see this happening in nanofluids research because it is an area of research close to mine. The nanofluid is simply a base liquid – it might be water, it might be ethanol – and into that you mix these very small nanoscale particles of some other material, such as gold, silver, or iron oxide. And in this sort of mixture of liquid and particles, you want to investigate its fluid flow and describe this with some differential equations. You can use computers to solve the differential equations and then plot some results about velocity profiles and heat transfer coefficients, etcetera. Now, you could write a paper for a given situation where you say, I’m not going to specify the liquid, but here is a general and viscosity of this liquid. If you want to apply this to your own research, you plug in the density and viscosity of your liquid, and likewise the particles. I’m not going to specify which particles are used, because all that changes is their density and their heat transfer coefficient properties. So that’s one way you could do it.

Another way to do it is to go I’m going to write a paper about water and gold particles; that’s one paper. Then you can write another paper which has water and silver particles, and then you can write one with ethanol and iron oxide, and there are so many varieties. You can also vary the geometry that this flow is going around, and you can add in an electric field and a magnetic field, etcetera. You can build up in this n-factorial way. There are thirty possible liquids multiplied by a hundred possible particles and multiplied by however many geometric configurations. You can see that this is what they are doing. Rather than writing a few quite general comprehensive papers, they are writing hundreds of very specific papers which enables them to produce more papers and sell more authorships and put more citations in. But this overwhelm of papers produced; there’s still only so many peer reviewers, and so many editors. And this phenomenon happens in lots of fields, they find something where there are just these variables that they can keep writing almost the same paper. Yet, the paper is original. It has not been done before. It is incredibly derivative, but that is not necessarily a barrier to publication.

LO: What I’m getting from this is, this is part of the whole system, and the issue at hand is definitely enabled by certain motivations like getting more citations. You can take one big piece of salami or publish that in one book, or you can slice the salami thirty ways. And if they are in the position to slice the salami, they say why not, I suppose, right? A game is there to be played.

NW: Right, they are playing the game that is in front of them. And again, there are people who do this who are not from a paper mill. They just want to maximize the number of citations and publications. The question is why are they doing this? Why do they want to maximize their publications? Because they want a promotion, or they want a tenured job. There are also countries where you get a cash reward for publishing a paper in a good journal so the more papers you publish, the more money you get paid. Your government might have told all the universities that they need to increase their ranking in the World University rankings. How do you do that? By increasing your research output and the citations you get. That is another driver. These drivers come from all sorts of places but there is always an emphasis on numbers. Citation count was once a proxy for quality and now it is citation count regardless of quality. People are only looking at the citation count and not the actual quality. Assessing quality takes a lot more effort.

LO: Citations used to be a proxy for quality, but that is not the case anymore. But it still implies the quality of the research, or you would hope.

NW: You would hope, but only because there is an assumption that the only reason something has a lot of citations is because it is good quality. Citations are also easier to count. Quality is much harder to account for, but that incentivizes people to do things like cite their colleagues. Again, you could still track it if people from the same university were citing each other. But then you get bigger scale things with middlemen who organize people from across the world to cite each other or just do it for cash. If you are publishing and you are producing papers to order, each one of those papers has a reference section which is real estate. You can throw in and have some genuine references which are relevant to this paper, but you can also throw in some irrelevant references that someone paid you to include. You can also pay someone to include references that are actually relevant to a topic.

LO: If it is relevant to a topic, it is almost like merely encouraging someone to be aware of certain work as opposed to a scam, which sounds like a gray area.

NW: Well, I would say that as soon as someone is paying money, then it starts to be illegitimate. But I mean if someone emails you and says “I’ve just published this paper, I think you might be interested, it’s in your research field: maybe read it or maybe you do cite it”, it’s different from someone emailing you to say “I’ll pay you £50 if you cite my paper” and you do. Then I would say that you have crossed a line. So, it does get very gray. Then there are these organized paper mills who are doing this as a business and that is where I think it becomes quite clear that it is probably not legitimate.

Facebook (authorship) marketplace

NW: You could go on Facebook and there are people selling authorship of their paper as a one off. There are PhD students in some country with no research funding who say “it costs $2500 for the article processing charge for me to publish where I would like to publish, I do not have $2500 so if you pay the $2500, you can be first author on the paper” and that is the only way they can get their paper published. They’re not doing this as a business, they’re just doing this once for this one paper. And you get people responding. Quite often professors or more established academics with access to budgets are the ones who will say yes. And the only thing that the person has done is to provide the funding for the publication.

The minimum thing that one is supposed to have done to be considered an author is to have either written the draft or reviewed and edited the paper. You might have also done data analysis or conceptualization. I think we would agree that if all this person does is just pay the fee for publication, then that is not acceptable. But what if they read the paper and then made a couple of comments? Now they have reviewed and edited it, and so now they have done review, editing and funding. There are many big labs around the world that have some very senior scientist whose name is on every single paper that comes out of the lab. And what have they done? Well, they provided all the funding, and they have reviewed the paper. I bet there are some who have barely glanced at the paper. But let’s say that they have reviewed the paper, and they provided the funding for the publication. Is that what makes it different to the person on Facebook who has found some random professor from another country to pay for their publication? Where is the difference? I don’t think it is an easy line to draw. In this way, the move to Open Access publishing requiring large fees for publication has also driven quite a bit of this phenomenon.

LO: It also seems like you have developed a bit of empathy. Maybe you’ve looked at so many cases and you see that it’s not always clear.

NW: Absolutely. Again, if you have the people running a paper mill, or if you have some professor who is being bribed and waving through dozens of papers, I don’t have much empathy for them. But the Masters or PhD student who has been told that they have to publish papers to get their PhD or even a Masters and they have this demand placed on them, or they even have produced a paper but they need this on the all this money to get it published, I don’t blame them for what they’re doing. It’s the situation they’ve been placed in. It is the system that they are part of. I have a lot of empathy for them.

Look out for the final post coming next week, where we get Nick’s take on what he thinks should be the repercussions for engaging in fraud, and we get a parting tip from Nick on what researchers should do when performing a literature search on papers in their field.

Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (2/4)

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We are back again with our second blog post featuring Dr Nick H. Wise, Research Associate in Architectural Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. As is the theme of the Data Diversity podcast, we spoke to Nick about his experience as a researcher, but this is a special edition of the podcast. Besides being a scientist and an engineer, Nick has made his name as a scientific sleuth who, based on an article on the blog Retraction Watch which was written in 2022, is responsible for more than 850 retractions, leading Times Higher Education to dub him as a research fraudbuster. Since then, through his X account @Nickwizzo, he has continued his investigations, tracking cases of fraud and in some cases, naming and shaming the charlatans.

In this four-part series, we will learn from Nick about some of the shady activities that taint the scientific publishing industry today. In this second part, we get Nick’s take on the peer review process and fake research data, and I ask his opinion on where the fault lies in the publication of fraudulent research. Below are some excerpts from the conversation, which can be listened to in full here. 

There are indices like Scopus or Web of Science or SCI, all these different bodies who claim journals are trustworthy, but every journal is going to get attacked by fraud and some will slip through. It is what you do afterwards that matters. 

On the peer review process

LO: As an Early Career Researcher, scientist, engineer, and researcher yourself, is your trust in the whole system still intact? Do you still see value in the peer review process? 

NW: It has absolutely changed how I read a paper and how I view particular journals. When you see a problem happening in a journal that you have read in your research or a journal you have considered submitting to, it really gives you pause for thought. There is an entire ecosystem of journals, right from the from the very good down to the very bad, that are implicated. There are indices like Scopus or Web of Science or SCI, all these different bodies who claim journals are trustworthy, but every journal is going to get attacked by fraud and some will slip through. It is what you do afterwards that matters. Another phenomenon that particularly happens with publishers with a wide list of journals, is that the paper mill will legitimately buy the journal. They may even take it over in a hostile way: they will make a clone of the journal and the website, and they will even redirect the publisher’s link to a different website. They now control a journal that is officially on this trustworthy list. Now they have a short period of time before someone notices and in that time, they will try to publish as many papers as possible and charge everyone for publication. They will absolutely cram this journal with any content. It does not even have to be relevant to the topic because they’re fully in control of the whole process up until the publisher notices and removes the journal from the list. For an author who needs a journal in a paper published in a well-regarded journal, they have achieved what they needed but as soon as the journal is removed from the list, then it becomes worthless. But there is a large supply of these journals, and they will keep trying to take them over. This tends to happen with low tier journals, but there are also paper mills which are targeting journals with an impact factor of over five, over ten – the supposedly absolute top tier journals. 

Between incompetence and conspiration

LO: These days, fraud is so convincing, scams are so rampant, and they always target your insecurities, the insecurity here being authors who want citations. 

NW: I would say that it is not a scam or fraud for the researcher, in the normal sense. These people are selling citations, and the buyer gets citations as opposed to someone getting cheated for their money and getting nothing in return. They are scamming the publishers and scamming the scientific community, but they are not scamming an actual person paying the money. It is a business that is operating as it says it is.  

LO: What does it say, though, that fraudulent papers are still getting through the peer review process. It’s still quite a long way from first draft to publication, and we have seen some cases where remnants of text from Chat GPT replies like “as a large language model…” gets through the review process. In your mind, what does it say about the industry? What’s happening here? 

NW: I think that it is somewhere between incompetence, people in a rush, and peer reviewers being bypassed or being paid. They could also be colluding with authors or the paper mill. To be fair, there are dodgy things that get through a legitimate peer review in the first place. All the peer reviewers are independent but how many people read every single word right of a paper they peer review? Not everyone. People have different standards that they hold themselves to. There is no agreed standard of what you are supposed to do to peer review a paper. As I’m sure anyone who has received peer review reports would know, sometimes you receive a five-page PDF document with hundreds of bullet points, and sometimes you receive a paragraph which maybe took them half an hour to put together. Legitimate peer reviewers could just not do a good job. Then there are also people who pride themselves on doing a load of peer reviews, and in fact you can get certificates from the publisher about how many peer reviews you do. There are people who say they peer review nearly a paper a day – I doubt that they are doing a great job at it.  

Even if someone is reading the text, how much is a peer reviewer supposed to be checking the data? Should someone be trying to run statistical analysis to see if they have been fudged? Should they be spotting that the image is manipulated? Is that something we should expect the peer reviewer to be doing? Or should a peer reviewer go into a review assuming the work is honest? It becomes a different process if you are also thinking about whether a piece of work is fraudulent or not. The easiest things to find are the people who are very lazy or very incompetent and there is just something that is so blatant that it is hard to miss. But if most people are trying to cover their tracks, then it comes down to just how well they have managed to do that. Again, if you are including remnants of Chat GPT like “as a large language model” in your text, you are either extremely lazy, or maybe you don’t read English. But if someone got rid of that bit, you would not notice from reading the abstract. You might think this is a bit bland, but people can write bland text; that is allowed. 

Sometimes peer reviewers are definitely compromised, and I don’t know what the balance is. When you see a bad paper, say a paper with an obvious problem or with chat GPT remnants lying around: is that bad peer reviewing or have they been paid not to notice, or even not to do it? I don’t know what the balance is there. I suspect it is more on the bad peer reviewing side than the criminal or the fraudulent to be honest, but I don’t know. There are times when you think OK, well, maybe they were paying the peer reviewers but did the editor look through this? Did the copy editor? We might want to think that copy editors and type setters are going through and questioning these things like this. It really depends on the journal. I have had things come back where they have gone through and changed from a comma to a dash, so they are clearly going through everything character by character. And there are other journals where the typesetter is clearly just taking everything with no thought. Their job is just to transfer what they have been given into the journal paper and they don’t do any spell checking or checking for grammar or anything. But should that be their job? I don’t know. Then there are journals where the only priority appears to be publishing as many papers as quickly as possible. And if you have made that your priority, even if everyone is acting in good faith, you are going to let a lot more things through. If you are just trying to push everything out the door and do things as quickly as possible, you are not going to give the things as much scrutiny. 

Fake research data

Even from doing my own research, I’ve realized that it would be very easy to fake some data. It would be very hard for anyone who wasn’t in the lab to know if data has been faked. There is no real way for someone to check. Even if you go open data; one experiment might need a few gigabytes of video footage to produce one data point. You can say what you have done to produce that data point, but for someone to go and check its validity, they would in theory need access to gigabytes and gigabytes of data that is not shared. But yes, there have been some things where it has been very easy to check. For instance, in material science, there are lots of experiments which result in the spectra diagram, basically producing a squiggly line on a graph. One thing that would always be true, and you don’t need any subject expertise to know this, is that the line should not double back on itself. Every X value should have one Y value. Well, if you are faking this by drawing it by hand with a mouse, it is quite hard to not double back and there are plenty of published Spectra which have bits where a peak bends over. And it is clearly because someone has drawn it by hand, and some of them are very bad. And that is again where you question what is happening with peer review because it is obvious that something is wrong. Sometimes they will even go outside the lines of the bounding box. I do see some of those because they are quite easy to spot. 

Stay tuned as we release the third conversation with Nick next week. In the penultimate post, we learn from Nick about how researchers try to generate more citations from a single piece of research from a trick called ‘salami slicing’ and the blurred lines between illegality and desperately coping to meet with the unrealistic expectations of academia to the point of engaging with fraud.