Category Archives: Policy development

Achievements, Challenges, Recommendations workshop: RDM support & guidance (1B)

Here at the JiscMRD Achievements, Challenges and Recommendations workshop, Joy Davidson (HATII and the DCC) chaired session 1B on research data management support and guidance.  Jez Cope (Research360 at Bath), Rachel Proudfoot (RoaDMaP at Leeds), Hannah Lloyd-Jones of Open Exeter and Anne Spalding (stepping into Leigh Garrett’s shoes for the KAPTUR project at UCA) all shared their experiences of developing tailored advice and guidance for their host institutions and / or target disciplines.

Jez described very clearly how the Research360 project went about the formulation and production of their resource, finding very similar challenges and solutions to those noted by e.g. the Incremental project in MRD01, including the usefulness of some fundamental but often overlooked details such as placing the resource as high in the university website architecture as possible (theirs is at http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/data) which helps to ensure the resource is not seen as partisan to one discipline or service over others; and listing in website A-Z directories under something meaningful and findable to users (in their case ‘R’ for ‘research’ and ‘D’ for ‘data’ as opposed to their project acronym).

Usability also extends into the layout on the homepage, where content can be accessed via a menu of RDM topics (for those with a bit of RDM knowledge) or by project phase for those with less RDM knowledge.

Jez noted that much of his role has been to work as a translator between technical and non-technical people.  Rachel Proudfoot is also bringing together different staff groups: RoaDMaP work draws on a working group containing key contacts from varied services and areas of the university including the university training service, IT services, the library and faculties.  Rachel’s experience is that this approach not only provides an essential mix of expertise to inform your outputs, but also gives you access to new channels for administration and promotion of training events and awareness-raising efforts.  Rachel was pragmatic about re-purposing existing training resources already created at Leeds, e.g. made for one discipline and re-used for another.  Whilst Jez was clear that getting material from other people at the institution always takes longer than even the most generous estimate, in Rachel’s experience reusing one’s own materials can be tricky too.

The Open Exeter project has been remarkable for their use of a group of PGR students from varied disciplines as active participants in project work where, for a fee (and an iPad!) they have functioned as the face of the project at university events and across their peer group.  The group members have also supplied responses and feedback to various project outputs and so helped to make sure guidance and events are relevant and meaningful to this group of researchers, and produced a ‘survival guide’ for distribution at induction which helps to make the case for RDM to newly-arrived PGRs.  In this way, they have made the work of the project a lot more visible through peer-to-peer and student-to-supervisor (!) education about RDM at Exeter.  They also contributed better understanding of the needs of active researchers in a way that was more practical in terms of time and cost than trying to work with more senior researchers. The students in turn have new knowledge of and skills in RDM, have received specialised help from the university and external experts and have a new element to add to their academic CV. This fruitful relationship has contributed much to Open Exeter’s online guidance resources: due to the varied disciplines represented by the PGRs, their case studies and other contributions are truly central to the webpage at http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/resources/openaccess/openexeter/.

Another fruitful relationship was described by Anne Spalding in the last presentation in the session, a description of the KAPTUR project.  KAPTUR has a fairly unusual challenge of involving four creative arts-focused academic institutions on a common quest to understand and manage research data in the visual arts.  Anne noted that this is a discipline-area with particular challenges around the definition of what constitutes research data – an ongoing area of work for the project.  She also noted that project work, as with other projects such as Open Exeter’s DAF survey, was built upon the findings of surveys of researchers to understand current data-related practice.  As with the other projects of this group, a range of areas of the institution were involved; in this case libraries, training services and others were asked to feed into policy formation and UCA had their data policy passed by senior management in February 2013.  Anne was clear that this policy will operate as a framework for further RDM infrastructure development work.

When discussing areas for future work, Joy and Rachel both agreed on the need for us to now consider how we extend capacity for RDM training in the institution.  There are relatively few with the skills and the confidence to train others in RDM: we need to train more trainers and extend the network of expertise at the institution, particularly in cases where the Jisc MRD project is not assured of continuation funding from their host HEI.  A useful idea at Leeds was inviting the DCC to attend – not to provide a training session but to critique the session presented by the project: this is an effective way to instil confidence and skill in RDM training at the institution, and can be extended by thoughtful deployment of the openly-available training and guidance resources already produced by the MRD programme.

Here are some of my thoughts from this session:

– The more you can find out about your audience beforehand, the better tailored (= more meaningful = more effective) your training can be, so get those pre-event questionnaires out and completed!

– Re-use of existing resources is possible and can be successful but may still need some effort and time to do well.  So whilst it’s worth while using the expertise of others, and always looks good to demonstrate awareness of the relevant resources that already exist, don’t do it simply be a short cut or a time-saver.

– Training cohorts of new researchers is good and well but we now need to start planning to train more senior academics.  They are the ones that allow RAs, postdocs and students to go off to training (or not); they are providing training recommendations to the students they supervise; they are the ones sitting on funder selection boards and ethics panels.  They need to be up to date on RDM, at least in their own discipline areas, and to be aware of what they don’t know.

Laura Molloy
e: laura.molloy AT glasgow.ac.uk

‘Institutional Policies, Strategies, Roadmaps’ session at JISC MRD and DCC IE workshop, Nottingham

The ‘Components of Institutional Research Data Services’ event on 24 October 2012 brought together the ongoing JISC MRD infrastructure projects as well as the institutions with which the Digital Curation Centre is running an ‘institutional engagement’.

The ‘Institutional policies, strategies, roadmaps’ session (session 1A) reflected this nicely, with two speakers from MRD projects ‘Admire’ and ‘Research360’, and two from DCC IEs, St Andrews and Edinburgh.

What is working?

Tom Parsons from Nottingham’s Admire project described further connections across this set of institutions, acknowledging the 2011 aspirational Edinburgh data policy (more on this later) as the inspiration for theirs at Nottingham, and underlining the importance of being aware of the requirements not only of major funders at your institution but also the institutional policies which exist: these need to be found, understood, and worked with to give a coherent message to researchers and support staff about RDM.  This can be done, as he noted, by reflecting these existing messages in your data policy but also by strengthening the data management aspects of these existing policies, and so making the most of any credibility they already have with university staff.

At Bath, RCUK funders are also important influences on progress.  Cathy Pink from Research360 has established that the biggest funder of research work at her institution is the EPSRC, and so Research360’s roadmap work to particularly respond to the EPSRC’s expectations is important at her university, and was published earlier this year.  Bath has looked to the Monash University work to guide its direction in policy formation, particularly to inform strategic planning for RDM and making a clear connection between work at the university to advance RDM and the university’s existing strategic aims: an intelligent way to garner senior management buy-in.

Cathy noted that the DAF and Cardio tools from DCC were both useful in ascertaining the existing situation at Bath: these measures are important to take both in order to identify priorities for action, and also in order to be able to demonstrate the improvements (dare I say impact?) brought about by your work in policy formulation and / or training and guidance provision.

To be taken seriously at the institution and to promote awareness and buy-in, Cathy urged institutions to incorporate feedback from a wide range of relevant parties at the university: research support office, the library, IT support and the training support office where available.  This promotes a coherent approach from all these stakeholders as well as a mutually well-informed position on what each of these areas can contribute to successful RDM.

Birgit Plietzch from St Andrews also found DAF and Cardio relevant to ascertain the current data management situation at her institution but felt the processes could be usefully merged.   Birgit’s team again started by finding out who was funding research at the university (400+ funders!) and then increasing their understanding of these funders’ RDM requirements to create a solid base for policy work.  Again, the Monash University work in this area was useful at her institution, and when the EPSRC roadmap work was completed, as with Bath, it helped to demonstrate the relevance of RDM to diverse areas of institutional activity.

Edinburgh’s Stewart Lewis, too, described the value of creating relationships not only with senior management champions for RDM but also between the university mission statement or strategic aims, and RDM policy.  Stewart acknowledged that the aspirational policy published by Edinburgh in 2011 is a useful way to both instigate and lead on improved RDM at the university, but that action is also crucial.  The aspirational mode of policy gives a stable, high-level statement which is then enacted through supporting, and more volatile, documents.  So whilst action is devolved from the top-level document, it is still intrinsically important if culture change is to happen.  To this end, they have created various levels of implementation groupings to carry through specific actions.  Infrastructure specified by their policy work includes a minimum storage amount and training provision.

In accordance with the Grindley Theory of Four Things (see the – fittingly – 4th bullet point of https://mrdevidence.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/11/05/research-data-management-programme-training-strand-kick-off-workshop-london-26-october/), Edinburgh is concentrating on four high level  areas: planning, infrastructure, stewardship and, lastly, support across these three.   These areas were chosen in order to meaningfully move forward the RDM work at Edinburgh whilst still making sense to the researcher population.

Challenges and lessons learned

Tom shared some findings gathered by Admire from their survey of the institution’s researcher population which shows around 230 projects are currently funded and so storage requirements are substantial.  Most of these projects are funded by RCUK funders, and so the expectations for a well-organised approach to RDM are also pretty substantial.  When c. 92% of researchers surveyed at the institution report having had no RDM training, we can understand the need for (and scale of) Admire’s work!

Cathy echoed Tom’s point: don’t attempt to simply lift one institution’s work and hope to apply it to yours.  The tailoring required is significant if a set of policies is going to work in your own context.

The first attempt at the RDM policy for Bath was rejected by the senior management group.  Inspirationally, Cathy recognised this as a great opportunity to refine their work and improve the policy using the feedback received.  It also helped clarify their ambitions for the policy and resolved the team to do better than ‘just good enough’: being tempered, of course, by the support infrastructure that could be realistically delivered by the institution – a similar situation as with Nottingham.

Cathy emphasised the point that good quality consultation across the institution is time-consuming but well worthwhile if you aim to build genuinely useful and effective policy or other resources.

Birgit also faced challenges in getting a wider acceptance of some promising RDM policy work.  The institutional environment, including a recent reshuffle of IT provision, had contributed problems to the smooth progress of their IE and senior management, once again, needed compelling evidence to understand the benefits of improved RDM for the institution.

Birgit also found that academics were overextended and found it difficult to make the time to participate in the research that her team needed to undertake to develop policy in this area, but when they realised the relevance they were keen to be involved in the process and to access RDM training.  The notion of the aspirational (as opposed to the highly-specified) mode of RDM policy is popular with researchers at her institution.

Next steps for Stewart and the team at Edinburgh include attaching costs, both in terms of person-time and financial, to the actions specified under their EPSRC roadmap, which will be published soon.  The team will also soon run focus groups using the DCC’s DMP Online tool, run a pilot of Datashare, establish what is needed by researchers in addition to storage, and run training for liaison librarians; these activities, however, need resources: the next challenge to meet.

Discussion picked up the balance between universities offering trustworthy storage appropriate for research data and the motivation of researchers to bid for these resources elsewhere: researchers bidding for this type of funding not only helps the university to concentrate resources in other useful areas but also helps to give a clear message to funders that if they want improved RDM, they have to be prepared to contribute financially towards it.

Costing was a popular topic: Graham Pryor (DCC) was interested that no speaker said they’ve attached costs.  Sometimes explicitly identifying costs means this work becomes unacceptable to senior management on financial grounds.  Paul Stainthorpe at Lincoln agreed that you can spend lots of time on policy, but it won’t be accepted unless there’s a business case.  Other institutions agreed, but added that senior management want some illustrative narrative in addition to the hard figures, to tell them why this really matters.

Birgit added that there is also the problem of unfunded research, particularly in the arts.  Her team has been receiving an increasing number of enquiries relating to this area, and it’s an area also being considered by Newcastle’s Iridium project, who have looked at research information management systems and discovered they only track funded work, leaving unfunded research as ‘a grey area’, even though it may be generating high impact publications.  At UAL, a partner in the KAPTUR project, lots of researchers do a lot of work outside the institution and not funded by it and so for the purposes of the project, they’re being explicit about managing funded work.

UAL has recently launched their RDM policy as a result of their KAPTUR work and stakeholders are happy with it in principle, but the challenge now is how to implement it: John Murtagh noted that engagement and understanding mean work must continue beyond the policy launch.  I mentioned the importance of training here as an element which has to be developed at the institution alongside policy and technical infrastructure.  This was agreed by Wendy White of Southampton: policy needs to be an ongoing dialogue and the challenge is to integrate these elements.

What could the MRD programme or the DCC do to help?

–          DCC: advise on whether funders are going to move the goalposts, and how realistic the risks are of this happening;

–          DCC: advise on what public funding can be used to support RDM policy work;

–          help with costing work

–          DCC: mediation between universities and the research councils, clarifying requirements and sharing universities’ experiences, etc.

–          DCC: providing briefings on current issues, e.g. PVC valued briefings re. open access.

Research data + research records management = research management?

Interesting meeting at Leicester this week with our Information Assurance Services. Andrew Burnham and myself have developed a roadmap to implement research data management policy as required for EPSRC and other funders and are currently leading the development of guidance and support for researchers in time for the new academic year. We are doing this in collaboration with colleagues in IT Services, the Academic Practice Unit, Library and Research Support Office on behalf of the Research Computing Management Group, chaired by our PVC Research & Enterprise Kevin Schurer, which feeds recommendations up to the University Research Committee. We are feeding in the many relevant external information and guidance resources as produced through the JISCMRD programme, UKDA, DCC and related.

I’ve lost some of you haven’t I?! To add to the confusion, there is also the university code of practice for researchers.

However, the question has arisen as to when and how we distinguish the university records management policy with this research data management policy? We are of course referring here to differences in language between different parts of central services in a university – never mind the disciplinary differences across the university academic community.

Information Assurance Services (IAS) currently have a records management policy tabled for university approval. It might be described as corporate based and is not immediately identified with research. And yet if sensitive data were to be lost in a researcher’s lab notes the matter would probably reach IAS before any other body in the university (they also handle FoI requests in the first instance). IAS identify the lab notes as “research records” not “research data” so is a “research records management policy” then required?

From a research data viewpoint we might think of research records as being about the process including funder specific and personal information about the researchers rather than the research itself. Indeed we made exactly this distinction when following up on an external research data audit to all research staff: “Do you use, reuse or generate sensitive (including commercial in confidence) research data?” Researchers tend to assume that departmental and university administrators will be looking after the “research records”.

So let’s clarify how IAS see it. They incorporate information compliance and security (including FoI and environmental concerns), risk management and business continuity. The question then arises: is there clear legal ownership of research data? Many researchers are somewhat surprised to find out their hard work is actually “owned” by their institution for these purposes. This becomes particularly relevant when researchers move institution, as of course they often do.

So I found myself wondering aloud: do we need a “research managment policy” which then refers to the “records management policy” guidance and the rather more prescriptive “research data management policy”?

Oxford digital infrastructure to support research workshop

The University of Oxford have impressively attempted to marshal the diverse projects ranging across disparate areas of expertise in research data management at the university. I attended a DaMaRo workshop today to review the digital infrastructure required to meet the challenges of the multi disciplinary and institutional research landscape as it pertains to Oxford.

First and foremost, this is no mean feat in a university as diverse and dispersed as Oxford and Paul Jeffreys and colleagues are to be congratulated for the work to date. It’s hard enough attempting join up in a smaller, albeit research intensive university such as Leicester and the road is long and at times tortuous. Never mind potentially at odds with established university structures and careers…

I particularly liked the iterative approach taken during the workshop: so present key challenges to the various stakeholders present; provide an opportunity to reflect; then vote with your feet (ok, post-it notes in traffic light colours) on which areas should be prioritised. At the very least this is useful even if we may argue over which stakeholders are present or not. In this case the range was quite good but inevitably you don’t get so many active researchers (at least in terms of publishing research papers) at this kind of meeting.

In assessing the potential research services it was pointed out where a charging model was required, if not funded by the institution or externally. Turns out here at Oxford the most popular choice was the proposed DataFinder service (hence no weblink yet!) to act as a registry of data resources in the university which could be linked to wider external search. I remember during the UK Research Data Service pathfinder project that there was a clearly identified need for a service of this kind. Jean Sykes of LSE, who helped steer the UKRDS through choppy waters, was present and told me she is about to retire in a couple of months. Well done Jean and I note that UKRDS launched many an interesting and varied flower now blossoming in the bright lights of ‘data as a public good’ – an itch was more than scratched.

I also note in passing that it was one of the clear achievements of the e-science International Virtual Observatory Alliance movement, developed for astronomical research between 2000-2010, that it became possible to search datasets, tools and resources in general via use of community agreed metadata standards. Takes medium to long term investment but it can be done. Don’t try it at home and don’t try and measure it by short term research impact measures alone…even the  Hubble Space Telescope required a decade plus before it was possible to clearly demonstrate that the number of journal papers resulting from secondary reuse of data overtook the originally proposed work. Watch it climb ever upwards after that though…

Back to the workshop: we identified key challenges around Helpdesk type functionality to support research data services and who and how to charge when – in the absence of institutional funding. I should highlight some of the initiatives gaining traction here at Oxford but it was also pointed out that in house services must always be designed to work with appropriate external services. Whether in-house or external, such tools must be interoperable with research information management systems where possible.

Neil Jefferies described the DataBank service for archiving, available from Spring 2013, which provides an open ended commitment to preservation. The archiving is immutable (can’t be altered once deposited) but versioned so that it is possible to step back to an earlier version. Meanwhile Sally Rumsey described a proposed Databank Archiving & Manuscript Submission Combined DAMASC model for linking data & publications. Interestingly there is a serious attempt to work with a university spin off company providing the web 2.0 Colwiz collaboration platform which should link to appropriate Oxford services where applicable. It was noted that to be attractive to researchers a friendly user interface is always welcome. Launch date September 2012 and the service will be free to anyone by the way, in or out of Oxford.

Meanwhile, for research work in progress the DataStage project offers secure storage at the research group level while allowing the addition of simple metadata as the data is stored, making that step up to reusability all the easier down the line. It’s about building good research data management practice into normal research workflows and, of course, making data reusable.

Andrew Richards described the family of supercomputing services at Oxford. Large volumes of at risk storage are available for use on-the-fly but not backed up. You’d soon run into major issues trying to store large amounts of this kind of dataset longer term. There is also very little emphasis on metadata in the supercomputing context other than where supplied voluntarily by researchers. I raised the issue of sustainability of the software & associated parameters in this context where a researcher may need to be able to regenerate the data if required.

James Wilson of OUCS described the Oxford Research Database Service ORDS which will launch around November 2012 and again be run on a cost recovery basis. The service is targeted at hosting smaller sized databases used by the vast majority of researchers who don’t have in-house support or appropriate disciplinary services available to them. It has been designed to be hosted in a cloud environment over the JANET network in the same way as biomedical research database specific applications will be provided by Leicester’s BRISSkit project.

Last but not least, Sian Dodd showed the Oxford Research Data Management website which includes contact points for a range of research data lifecycle queries. It is so important to the often isolated researcher that there is a single place to go and find out more information and point to the tools needed for the job at hand.  Institutions in turn need to be able to link data management planning tools to in-house resources & costing information. To that end, the joint Oxford and Cambridge X5 project (named after the bus between the two) will go live in February 2013 and provide a tool to enable research costing, pricing & approval.

Chatham House at Weetwood Hall: emerging themes from the JISCMRD02 institutional RDM policy workshop

Earlier this week, I and my co-facilitator had four wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussions across two days with the JISCMRD02 projects who attended the programme workshop on institutional research data management policy development and implementation at Weetwood Hall in Leeds.  Conducted under the Chatham House rule, we hoped projects and interested Fellow Travellers would feel able to share their challenges, successes, questions and institutional quirks openly, and I’d like to thank the participants for their time and energy in doing so!

It has been indicated to me that some preliminary notes of themes arising from our discussion would be useful, in advance of more detailed reporting.  I’d like to share some of the main themes that emerged from our group, with the provisos that:

  • these only represent one of the several discussion groups – main themes from the others may vary (and you can read Bill Worthington’s useful account from another group here); and
  • these are presented here for interest and discussion – please don’t interpret any of them as the official position of or advice from the MRD02 programme, the DCC or JISC – they’re simply ideas that bubbled up from our group conversations and were contributed by twelve individuals representing ten very diverse institutions, as well as the thoughts of our facilitator.

That said, we hope the lessons they’ve learned from their work so far in RDM policy development will be useful to others travelling the same path.

Themes and observations:

– At this point (March 2012), institutions are still all at different stages with their research data management policies.  However, as far as  they’re funded by the major funding councils, research councils and associated bodies, institutions are all subject to a common set of requirements, mandates and expectations from those funders, in addition to UK and EU legislation. In other words, the responsibility to have these expectations and requirements clarified and complied with is already there. It’s now up to institutions to decide their approach to an appropriate and realistic response.

– The idea of having an institutional research data management policy in place at your institution can be reassuring.  However, having a policy in place without any real buy-in from staff can be more harmful over time – by breeding complacency – than having no policy yet in place. So it’s best to take a little longer and get it right than rush through a policy in which researchers, research support staff or senior management have no investment or of which they have little awareness.

– A useful approach may be to craft an aspirational, high-level document which outlines principles as opposed to specific attributions of responsible persons, workflows, budgets and so on.  This high-level statement is often more easily understood by senior management and so can be the most effective way to get the policy through university senior committees and into institutional regulations.  This high-level policy should then be accompanied by, and executed by way of, working documents which translate the principles into specific tasks allocated to specific roles.  It should be anticipated that the high-level policy will not need frequent changes; it should allow enough room for, for example, new funder requirements, whereas the working documents should be regularly updated and seen as much more volatile documents.  This is, however, only one type of approach to institutional RDM policy development.  See also the JISCMRD02 Open Exeter project’s blog on the value of aspirational policy here.

– Policy and infrastructure need to evolve in correlation.  Some policies have been well-written but have foundered at the point of senior approval because they have specified responsibilities and workflows which the institution didn’t yet have the infrastructure to deliver.  At the same time, a well-organised policy can help to make the case to senior management for the investment in the necessary infrastructure.  This is another argument in favour of the high-level principles-based approach to the main policy, which can then be used to justify moving towards a more detailed position over time, via the working documents, whilst avoiding the danger of being rejected because of the lack of infrastructure.  It’s also an argument in favour of carrying out some surveying of the current state of infrastructure at your institution – including the ‘soft’ infrastructure elements of training provision, current skills levels in relevant staff groups, staff awareness of the requirements under which they’re currently working, etc.

– Consider the other policies – both internal and external – with which your new research data management policy should work in concert.  It’s obviously better to identify and iron out any potential wrinkles between these before you start plugging the new policy to senior management.  Examples of internal documents may include institutional policies on digital preservation, IT equipment use, open data, response to Freedom of Information requests, data protection, research ethics, intellectual property and academic integrity.  External documents to consider may include the Data Protection Act, Freedom of Information legislation, INSPIRE regulations, environmental data legislation, expectations and requirements of your funding council, expectations and requirements of your research funders, the Research Integrity Office’s research code of conduct, the RCUK code of research practice and relevant legislation relating to use of government data, intellectual property and copyright.

– Retain awareness of the different roles and legislation for research data and administrative data.  Whilst anyone drafting a research data management policy would benefit from knowledge of how the institution handles administrative data, and there may be some crossover in relevant legislation (particularly UK and EU legislation for some aspects of both), it’s important to remember these two categories of data have different purposes, different stakeholders, and attract different expectations by funders, and so should be dealt with by discrete policies, clearly pitched to the relevant audience for each.

– Try to avoid taking the view that researchers will automatically resist implementation of a research data management policy.  Some may be suspicious of it, some will be enthusiastic – and the difference is often down to the approach used.  In institutions where the development and implementation of such a policy is presented as a way to help researchers (e.g. ‘We’ll look after it so you don’t have to’, promotion of the benefits to the researcher, etc.), as opposed to being a new rule or requirement imposed by the central administration, researchers have generally responded enthusiastically.

– Whilst recent research (e.g. the JISC/RIN/DCC DaMSSI project) found that researchers respond well to data management training when it is presented as just one of many aspects of excellence in research practice, there is a tension between embedding RDM training as just another part of routine business and highlighting it sufficiently to attract attendance at training and to ensure researchers pay attention to good RDM practice.  Motivation can be helped by underlining the benefits of good RDM practice to the researcher’s career and profile, their enhanced ability to find their own work in the future, increased impact and a more efficient way of working.

Do any of these points chime with your experience?  Or contradict it?  Let us know in the comments!