Category Archives: Introductions

Developing Research Data Management Policy

This is Jonathan Tedds (@jtedds): Senior Research Liaison Manager for IT Services; researcher in astronomy and research data management at the University of Leicester. By way of a first blog post proper here in JISCMRD Towers I want to introduce the increasingly higher profile area of Research Data Management (RDM) policy and why it’s rapidly moving from desirable to essential.

Following the agreement by the RCUK umbrella body of research funders on common data principles for making research data reusable – data as a public good – and similar moves by larger charitable trusts such as Wellcome, funders have then batted the ball back to institutions and said deal with it! The EPSRC in particular requires that institutions in receipt of grant funding establish a clear roadmap to align their policies and processes with EPSRC’s expectations by 1st May 2012, and are fully compliant with these expectations by 1st May 2015 – yes, you did read that correctly, that’s a roadmap by this May! Sarah Jones of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has just blogged about this following a refreshed look at this area during the very well attended recent DCC Roadshow at Loughborough in February 2012.

Of course there are many other reasons why any institution that it is serious about research should be investing in the support of RDM and Angus Whyte and I recently co-authored a DCC Briefing on making the case for research data management which sets the national and international context as well as describing the experiences in the last 3 years at the University of Leicester. As a consequence institutions (and more specifically those held accountable for supporting researchers) are now realising, if they didn’t already, that they need to plan for research data management infrastructure on the ground across the entire research data lifecycle. Crucially they will also need high level policy at the institutional level to make this a reality. So how to go about it?

Well there are a few institutions that already have policies in place including Edinburgh, Oxford, Northampton and Hertfordshire. The DCC maintains a list of these with links to relevant institutional data policies. Of course this in itself is a grey area as your institution may well already have a code of practice which covers at least some of this ground. But does the policy (or the code!) always connect to the practice on the ground? Bill Worthington, who leads the Research Data Toolkit (Herts) JISCMRD project, has recently blogged on their work in this area.

At Leicester we have been building up to an institutional level policy to fit alongside an existing code of practice adopting a rather ground up approach; building on exemplars such as the JISCMRD Halogen interdisciplinary database hosting project and the current BRISSkit UMF project I lead for cross NHS-University biomedical research alongside high profile central investment in high performance computing (HPC). I facilitate a Research Computing Management Group across the University which takes a strategic view of these issues and will inform our own institutional level policy working party.

A recent email exchange on the JISCMRD mailing list showed a strong interest from the many new (and established) institutes involved in getting together to discuss a number of issues around developing and implementing RDM policies. Following an online poll it was decided to host a lunch-to-lunch meeting, supported by the Programme and assisted by the DCC, to takes this forward at the University of Leeds on March 12-13th 2012. Based on the poll we are expecting up to 50 participants. I’ll link to further details as they are finalised and made available. Themes raised to date include:

  • How are projects/institutions developing policies? Covering considerations of general principles, guidelines from funders and other bodies, specific considerations for the institution in question.
  • How are people getting approval for policies? A chance to share – e.g. off the record or by the Chatham House Rule – some of the challenges which may be faced.
  • How are people planning to support the implementation of the policies? How do projects/institutions intend to support transition from policy to practice?  Policy, infrastructure and guidance.  Interplay of top-down and bottom-up elements?  How to build mention and requirements of subject specific and/or institutional services into institutional policies.
  • How technical solutions affect policy decisions How much will policy be driven by what is technically available to an institution as a (suite of) data management solutions.
  • How are we going to assess and critique the success of RDM systems and policies

Finally, there are of course difficulties in all of this focus on the institutional level. As a researcher myself (astronomy) I argue that a researcher or research group is likely to have much more in common regarding their requirements to manage their data with a similar researcher or group in the same discipline but residing in any other institution (including international) compared to another researcher/group even in the same building. So we are asking a lot for institutions to meet this full range of requirements across all of their research areas. Researchers rather tend to look to their disciplinary learned societies or evaluation panels established by funders to provide coordinated responses. To be sure, the institutions have a strong role to play and shoulder a strong measure of responsibility but they are by no means the whole answer to the problem as I blogged in Research Fortnight (February 2011).

Please allow me to introduce myself..

..not sure wealth and taste will have something to do with our Evidence Gatherer roles in JISCMRD02, but I definitely have been around for a while – as have Laura and Jonathan – playing with tools and notions of Research Data Management (RDM). BTW, thanks for the great intros Laura!

With the begin of the JISCMRD Programme in 2009 I started working on the MaDAM project as a ‘user liaison’, trying to understand users’ requirements in their research domains along their data lifecycle, working closely with users and the whole project team on developing a pilot RDM infrastructure covering a technical system, support for Data Management Plans and Policies and embedding all this for our pilot user groups at the University of Manchester, taking into account the institutional landscape and all players – and raising awareness. MaDAM ended mid-2011, but based on the increasing need for a University-wide RDM Service Infrastructure and the pilot’s findings and experiences (MaDAM outputs) we are able to continue our journey with the second phase project MiSS – MaDAM into Sustainable Service. I myself am also a researcher (working at the Manchester eResearch Centre, MeRC at University of Manchester) interested generally in socio-technical systems, RDM, disciplinary differences, processes of adoption and evolving use. My approach with users is a more qualitative one grounded in studies of working practice, iterative system development and user-driven design.

Our Evidence Gatherer role will be very exciting as it involves taking into account the various views and needs of the JISCMRD projects, which means collaborating, learning, identifying themes and trends together and providing lessons learned from our previous endeavours. At the JISCMRD launch event (see Laura’s post below) and also at the IDCC11 in Bristol we talked to many colleagues from the other projects (and the community in general) and already noted topics close to their heart: Sarah Jones commented on Laura’s ‘The Three Monkeys’ post pointing out an important question raised for us in one of the launch event’s breakout sessions “about whether commonalities lie within disciplines or if we should be comparing workflows and processes across disciplines as researchers from different areas may have similar needs”. Similar points from other participants alluded to the need to identify disciplinary differences and commonalities across institutions and in terms of methodological approaches. We are looking forward to helping to ‘link up’, ‘build on previous work’ and ‘create mutual benefits’ through our work as Evidence Gatherers.

Meik Poschen  <meik.poschen@manchester.ac.uk>
Twitter:  @MeikPoschen

The Three Monkeys: New Evidence-Gatherer Roles for the JISC Managing Research Data programme

The JISC Managing Research Data (‘JISC MRD’) programme is now in its second iteration, MRD02.  In this second funded phase, JISC MRD02 is showing no signs of slowing down, arguably reflecting the growing attention now being focused on research data management.  As JISC is compelled to gather and disseminate evidence of the impact of its work and the projects it funds, programme manager Simon Hodson recruited three evidence gatherers to help him with this aspect of programme management.

Like the three monkeys of the fable, Meik, Jonny and I all have slightly different ways of looking at life (and we do have a bad habit of sitting together in a row at meetings), but we’re all survivors of MRD01 projects, we all care deeply about research data management and we’re all concerned about how to increase the articulation of research data management principles and best practice between different audiences, ideally for the mutual benefit of all.

I’ll let Meik (Twitter: @MeikPoschen) and Jonny (Twitter: @jtedds) introduce themselves, but I thought it might be useful to briefly describe the kind of things I’ve already worked on in this area, how this informs my particular perspective on research data management in the context of the current JISC MRD programme, and what I hope to do under the auspices of the evidence gatherer work.

I was a minor member of the team of the late, lamented Arts and Humanities Data Service, specifically the AHDS Performing Arts data centre.  AHDS-PA was funded by the AHRC and the JISC, and we gathered the research outputs of AHRC-funded performance-related work for preservation purposes but also to encourage the use and re-use of these resources in research and teaching.  It was during the life of this work, before the cessation of AHRC funding in March 2008, that I started to learn about this field of digital preservation and the archival principles behind much of it.

After AHDS-PA, I began work on the EC-funded FP6 project Planets (http://www.planets-project.eu/), which was a four-year effort developing tools and services for digital preservation.  My main activity was working with a small team in the UK, and teams of local organisers in five different European countries, to develop and deliver training events in the project’s final year.  We produced one event each in Copenhagen, Bern, London, Rome and Sofia.  The first day of each event was devoted to outreach, i.e. awareness-raising for senior managers and budget holders, and days two and three delivered hands-on training for technical staff with Planets tools.  I also developed a series of basic online training materials including a series of videos, an annotated reading list and some summaries of the outreach day of the live training events, written for a technical audience in collaboration with IBM.  The results of Planets are now sustained by the Open Planets Foundation.

After Planets, the first JISC MRD programme funded a project at Glasgow and Cambridge universities to look at the existing data management practices of researchers at these two institutions, and then to build on these findings to deliver tailored training and guidance to improve how research data is managed throughout its lifecycle.  This work was called JISC Incremental and its outputs are available here http://www.glasgow.ac.uk/datamanagement (Glasgow) and here http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman (Cambridge).  There was a blog maintained by the team throughout the project for a slightly less formal account of proceedings, available here: http://incrementalproject.wordpress.com/.

As well as introducing me to the joys of punting and Fitzbillies teashop in Cambridge, my work on Incremental updated my knowledge about research data management, reaffirmed my belief in the value of user requirements-led resource development, and confirmed my suspicion that no matter how great tools and software for any kind of digital curation are, they won’t be used unless you can translate and articulate the benefits of using them to the people you want to be the users.  (For more discussion on the importance of audience-appropriate language in guidance and training, see my post on the Incremental blog at: http://incrementalproject.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/vocabularyjargonterminology-synonyms-and-specialist-language/.)

Most researchers we spoke to don’t see research data management as something either important or particularly relevant to them, and certainly not something upon which they want to expend money, time or mental energy.  Luckily for those of us who are concerned with this area, however, the shifting of funder requirements to more explicit demands for demonstrable research data management planning provides at least some motivation for starting conversations with researchers.  (There are, however, disciplines with well-established and capable research data management practices and traditions, and I hope to unpack that issue in later blog posts.)

I was also involved in a later, shorter project called DaMSSI, the Data Management Skills Support Initiative, which was funded as part of the MRD01 Research Data Management Training Materials strand.  DaMSSI is described and documented here: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/data-management-courses-and-training/skills-frameworks.

As well as the specific findings and outputs of the Incremental and DaMSSI work, I also learned a lot about the JISC MRD programme, its protocols, culture and key people, and hopefully this will serve as a useful background for work on the second iteration of the programme.

Comments to anything we write in this blog are always going to be warmly welcomed, and you are also encouraged to feedback in your own (linked) blog posts, or via Twitter – I can be found on Twitter @LM_HATII.