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Methods getting their chance to shine – Apollo wants your methods!
By Dr. Kim Clugston, Research Data Co-ordinator, Office of Scholarly Communication Underlying all research data is always an effective and working method and this applies across all disciplines from STEMM to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Methods are a detailed description of the tools that are used in research and can come in many forms depending on the type of research. Methods are often overlooked rather than being seen as an integral research output in their own right. Traditionally, published journals include a materials and methods section, which is often a summary due to restrictions on word limits making it difficult for other researchers to reproduce the results or…
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The Data Picture
I was recently named one of “the next generation of [library] leaders” as part of the CILIP 125, having been recognised as an individual who contributes energy and knowledge to improving and impacting their organisation. My area of expertise, and thus recognition, lies with the use of data within libraries. As a data analyst for the Office of Scholarly Communications at Cambridge University Library, my role focuses on empowering decisions with data driven understanding – such as supporting the Springer Nature negotiations. To develop my understanding of data, and its role within a wider organisation, further, I engage with data beyond the library – such as the Big Data London…
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Lessons learned from Jisc Research Data Champions
In 2017 four Cambridge researchers received grants from Jisc to develop and share their research data management practices. In this blog, the four awardees each highlight one aspect of their work as a Jisc Data Champion. The project All four Champions embarked on a range of activities throughout the year including creating local communities interested in RDM practices, delivering training, running surveys to understand their department better, creating ‘how-to’ guides for would-be RDM mentors and testing Samvera as part of RDSS. They were excited by the freedom that the grant gave them to try out whatever RDM related activities they wanted, which meant they could develop their skills and see…
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Benchmarking RDM Training
This blog reports on the progress of the international project to benchmark Research Data Management training across institutions. It is a collaboration of Cambridge Research Data Facility staff with international colleagues – a full list is at the bottom of the post. This is a reblog, the original appeared on 6 October 2017. How effective is your RDM training? When developing new training programmes, one often asks oneself a question about the quality of training. Is it good? How good is it? Trainers often develop feedback questionnaires and ask participants to evaluate their training. However, feedback gathered from participants attending courses does not answer the question how good was this…
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Milestone -1000 datasets in Cambridge’s repository
Last week, Cambridge celebrated a huge milestone – the deposit of the 1000th dataset to our repository Apollo since the launch of the Research Data Facility in early 2015. This is the culmination of a huge amount of work by the team in the Office of Scholarly Communication, in terms of developing systems, workflows, policies and through an extensive advocacy campaign. The Research Data team have run 118 events over the past couple of years and published 39 blogs. In the past 12 months alone there have been 26000 downloads of the data in Apollo. In some cases the dataset has been downloaded many times – 170 – and the data…
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Sustaining long-term access to open research resources – a university library perspective
In the third in a series of three blog posts, Dave Gerrard, a Technical Specialist Fellow from the Polonsky-Foundation-funded Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge project, describes how he thinks university libraries might contribute to ensuring access to Open Research for the longer-term. The series began with Open Resources, who should pay, and continued with Sustaining open research resources – a funder perspective. Blog post in a nutshell This blog post works from the position that the user-bases for Open Research repositories in specific scientific domains are often very different to those of institutional repositories managed by university libraries. It discusses how in the digital era we could deal with…
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Open at scale: sharing images in the Open Research Pilot
Dr Ben Steventon is one of the participants in the Open Research Pilot. He is working with the Office of Scholarly Communication to make his research process more open and here reports on some of the major challenges he perceives at the beginning of the project. The Steventon Group is a new group established last year which looks at embryonic development, in particular focusing on the zebrafish. To investigate problems in this area the group uses time-lapse imaging and tracks cells in 3D visualisations which presents many challenges when it comes to data sharing, which they hope to address through the Wellcome Trust Open Research Project. Whilst the difficulties that…
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‘Paperless research’ solutions – Electronic Lab Notebooks
The Office of Scholarly Communication started 2017 with a discussion about ‘going digital’ – on 13 January 2017 we organised an event at Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering to flesh out the problems preventing researchers from implementing Electronic Lab Notebook solutions. Chris Brown from Jisc wrote an excellent blog post with his reflections of the event* and agreed for us to re-blog it here. For researchers working in laboratories the importance of recording experiments, results, workflows, etc in a notebook is engrained into you as a student. However, these paper-based solutions are not ideal when it comes to sharing and preservation. They pile on desks and shelves, vary in quality…
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Press embargoes – a threat from the shadows
Something has been rumbling under the surface in the repository world recently, at least in the UK. Over the past six months or so, the Office of Scholarly Communication has had some fraught conversations with researchers who are terrified that their papers will be ‘pulled’ from publication by the journal. The reason is because some information about the upcoming paper is publicly available. The HEFCE policy asks us to deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript into a repository “as soon after the point of acceptance as possible” and to present the manuscript “in a way that allows it to be discovered by readers and by automated tools such as search engine”.…
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Open Data – moving science forward or a waste of money & time?
On the 4 November the Research Data Facility at Cambridge University invited some inspirational leaders in the area of research data management and asked them to address the question: “is open data moving science forward or a waste of money & time?”. Below are Dr Marta Teperek’s impressions from the event. Great discussion Want to initiate a thought-provoking discussion on a controversial subject? The recipe is simple: invite inspirational leaders, bright people with curious minds and have an excellent chair. The outcome is guaranteed. We asked some truly inspirational leaders in data management and sharing to come to Cambridge to talk to the community about the pros and cons of data…
