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In conversation with Michael Ball from BBSRC
The Biotechnical and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Data Sharing Policy states that research data that supports publications must be stored for 10 years and adherence to data management plans will be monitored and built into the Final Report score, which may be taken into account for future proposals. Recently Michael Ball, the Strategy and Policy Manager at BBSRC accepted an invitation to Cambridge University to discuss the BBSRC policy on opening up access to data. Senior members of the University, the School of Biological Sciences, the Research Office and the Office of Scholarly Communications attended. These notes have been verified by Michael as an accurate reflection of the discussion.…
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Openness, integrity & supporting researchers
Universities need to open research to ensure academic integrity and adjust to support modern collaboration and scholarship tools, and begin rewarding people who have engaged in certain types of process rather than relying on traditional assessment schemes. This was the focus of Emeritus Professor Tom Cochrane’s* talk on ‘Open scholarship and links to academic integrity, reward & recognition’ given at Cambridge University on 7 October. The slides from the presentation are available here: PRE_Cochrane_DisruptingDisincentives_V1_20151007 Benefits of an open access mandate Tom began with a discussion about aspects of access to research and research data and why it should be as open as possible. Queensland University of Technology introduced an open access mandate 12…
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Joint response on the draft UK Concordat on Open Research Data
During August the Research Councils UK on behalf of the UK Open Research Data Forum released a draft Concordat on Open Research Data for which they have sought feedback. The Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford prepared a joint response which was sent to the RCUK on 28 September 2015. The response is reproduced below in full. The initial main focus of the Concordat should be good data management, instead of openness. The purpose of the Concordat is not entirely clear. Merely issuing it is unlikely to ensure that data is made openly available. If Universities and Research Institutes are expected to publicly state their commitment to the Principles…
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Data sharing – build it and they will come
If a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to hear it, did it happen? You could ask the same philosophical question of research – if no-one can see the research results, what was the point in the first place? Moving science forward and increasing the knowledge of the world around implies exchange of findings. Society cannot benefit from research if there is no awareness of what has been done. Managing and sharing research data is a fundamentally important part of the research process. Yet researchers are often reluctant to share their data, and some are openly hostile to the idea. This blog describes the research data…
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In conversation with Ben Ryan from EPSRC
Cambridge University hosted Ben Ryan and Amanda Chmura from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on Friday 15 May for a discussion about how the University is meeting the EPSRC expectations for sharing research data. We started the conversation with a demonstration of the services we offer our researchers including our Research Data Management website, and talked about the open data sessions and other training events we have been holding. So far we have managed to speak to 764 researchers about data sharing requirements (the numbers continue to grow). Managing expectations In 2011 EPSRC published nine key expectations on research data management. The expectations are directed principally at…
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Data management – one size does not fit all
As the Research Data Facilitator at the University of Cambridge, I am part of the team establishing a Research Data Management (RDM) Facility at the University. This blog is a note of my impressions from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) meeting held in London on the 28th April 2015: Preparing Data for Deposit. As always, the DCC meeting was extremely useful for networking. I met with people at similar roles at other institutions. And again, the breakout sessions were invaluable – they allowed us to exchange precious experience, feedback gained and lessons learnt while developing RDM services. What could have been done better though is more appreciation for differences between universities. Unrealistic…
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Good news stories about data sharing?
We have been speaking to researchers around the University recently to discuss the expectations of their funders in relation to data management. This has raised the issue of how best to convince people this is a process that benefits society rather than a waste of time or just yet another thing they are being ‘forced to do’ – which is the perspective of some that we have spoken with. Policy requirements In general most funders require a Research Data Management Plan to be developed at the beginning of the project – and then adhered to. But the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have upped the ante by introducing a policy requiring that…
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Interview with Nigel Shadbolt on The Life Scientific
Sir Nigel Shadbolt was interviewed on ‘The Life Scientific‘ this morning on BBC Radio4 about open data. The general discussion ranged from his background and what got him interested in this area. The data being discussed is more about government public data (such as medical information or cyclist black spots) than that generated in research projects, but an interesting conversation nonetheless. A couple of items that jumped out to me: 16:50 – When we talk about data, really we are talking about information … Data and information and knowledge are kinda different and mostly when we talk about open data we are talking about information. Data (such as a number) only becomes information if it is…
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FORCE2015 observations & notes
This blog first appeared on the FORCE2015 website on the 14 January 2015 First a disclaimer. This blog is not an attempt to summarise everything that happened at FORCE2015 – I’ll leave that to others. The Twitter feed using #FORCE2015 contains an interesting side discussion, and the event was livestreamed with individual sessions live in two weeks here – so you can always check bits out for yourself. So this is a blog about the things that I as a researcher in scholarly communication working in university administration (with a nod to my previous life as a science communicator) found interesting. This is a small representative of the whole. This was…
