iridium – dissemination at Jisc MRD02 Achievements, Challenges and Recommendations Programme Workshop March 2013

The iridium project (@iridium_mrd) is attending the Jisc MRD02 Achievements, Challenges and Recommendations Programme Workshop March 25-26 2013.

Ben Allen will be presenting on observations of the technical landscape.

We will also present a poster on key project outputs.

iridium_Jisc_final_meeting_25_3_2013_sml

iridium – workshop talk and dissemination at JISC Progress Meeting, Nottingham

The iridium project presented at the JISC MRD02 Progress Meeting in Nottingham. The two day schedule from the event is here, together with the Programme introductory/close slides.

Workshop topics were:

• Institutional RDM policies; developing an institutional strategy and an ‘EPSRC’ roadmap
• Managing active data: storage, access, academic dropbox services
• Data management planning: developing good practice and providing effective support
• Data repositories and storage: options for repository service solutions
• Training & guidance
• Triage and handover: what to keep and where to entrust it? Selection and appraisal, deposit and handover
• Business case: covering roles, responsibility, costing, sustainability, advocacy etc
• Data catalogues: metadata profiles, identifiers

Individual projects were encouraged to contextualise presentations around the following themes:

[1] “what has worked/is working”
[2] “what lessons you have learned and how generalisable these may be”
[3] “what challenges remain”
[4] “how such challenges may be approached and what your institution/project intends to do”
[5] “what DCC / MRD activity you think may help make the challenge more tractable”

iridium ‘support’ presentation within ‘Training & Guidance’ session:

iridium presentation

iridium_JISC_Progress_25_10_2012_v4_web_sml_LW [.pdf]

We also presented two posters, one on the research data catalogue proof-of-concept and the second on our thematic analysis requirements gathering.

Other project presentations from the Programme are available here.

iridium – update on upcoming national research data management events

Upcoming national RDM events:

Call for Papers for International Digital Curation Conference
Deadline: extended to 30th (20^th August 2012)
The call for papers is very broad and inclusive, so take the opportunity to share your good practice: www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13/call-papers

DataCite Technical Workshop
11:00-15:00 10^th September 2012, The British Library Conference Centre, St. Pancras, London, NW1 2DB
This practical workshop is aimed at those who are considering incorporating DataCite services into their repository and would like to learn more about how to work with the technology.
The event will be limited to 15 people. We will consider running additional sessions if it is oversubscribed.
Please bring your own laptop.
If you would like to register for the event, please reply to this address with the following details:
Name:
Affiliation:
Project (e.g. repository name or JISC-MRD involvement):
Role:
Caroline Wilkinson
Data Management Project Officer
Science, Technology and Medicine
The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
Tel: 020 7412 7250
Email: caroline.wilkinson@bl.uk
Web: www.bl.uk/datasets
Mendeley Group: bit.ly/BLdatacitation

‘Managing the Material: Tackling Visual Arts as Research Data’ Workshop
09:45-16:00 14^th September 2012, HEFCE, Centre Point, London WC1A 1DD
Further details and registration is available from: http://kapturmrd01.eventbrite.co.uk/

SPRUCE Mashup
18^th-20^th September 2012, The Hubworking Centre, 5 Wormwood Street, EC2M 1RQ, London, United Kingdom
If you’d like to attend the SPRUCE Mashup London, please sign up here: http://sprucelondon.eventbrite.co.uk/
SPRUCE is a JISC funded Project. For more information see: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR

Call for Papers/Tools for 4th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI12) DDI – The Basis of Managing the Data Life Cycle
Deadline: 3^rd October 2012
Seeking both papers and tools on all things DDI. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please use the online submission system<http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi12/schedConf/cfp> of the conference. The deadline for submissions is October 3, 2012. Please use the same link to submit an abstract on your tool until October 3, 2012. The deadline for submissions of the final program code is November 17, 2012.

2nd Workshop on Semantic Statistics for Social, Behavioural, and Economic Sciences: Leveraging the DDI Model for the Linked Data Web
15^th-19^th October 2012, Leibniz Center for Informatics, Schloss Dagstuhl, Wadern, Germany
Further information on the workshop, including venue details<http://www.gesis.org/fileadmin/upload/dienstleistung/veranstaltungen_fortbildungen/workshops/Dagstuhl.pdf> and a registration form, is available on the website of the workshop: http://www.gesis.org/en/events/gesis-workshops/ddi/.

iridium – JISC MRD key benefits and metrics task from start-up meeting

A task assigned at the JISC MRD02 start-up meeting in Nottingham was to identify three key benefits that each project felt would be generated and indicate what evidence we felt would likely be be produced within and beyond the lifetime of the project.

Benefits and metrics were provided from the JISC MRD01 RDMI projects and Beagrie evaluation report:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/mrd/RDM_Benefits_FinalReport-Sept.pdf) [page 4].

Two major outcomes were identified in the iridium project plan:

i) an institutional research data management policy (as required by the funding councils)

Benefit = long-term road-maps for RDM

Metric = improvements overtime in benchmark results (e.g. surveys of awareness of relevant support services or funder requirements) 

Benefit = improve data management plans and policies

Metric = re-use of infrastructure in new projects

ii) a costed business case for a sustainable institution-wide research data management infrastructure to support that policy

Benefit = Sustainability of research data infrastructure

[Metric = Institutional buy-in over long time period? Ratification of sustainable policy framework (???)]

Benefit = Cost modelling to plan for increasing demand

[Metric =  Re-use of model/costed decisions to support new projects/policies; validated activity-based costing[1] (information discovery/retrieval/data loss[2] (???)]

I found sustainability and cost modelling metrics troublesome.

In the project plan, we also identified several other benefits.

iii) project plan (evaluation) benefits

Influence beyond project on other policies

Benefit = integrated thinking around RDM

Our metric = number of related policies revised/guided

Benefit= Data routinely discovered

Our metric  = increased number of successful data requests

Benefit = Permanent change to practice

Our metric = reduced number of negative outcomes related to poor RDM practice

Other projects work on this task is here:

http://mrdevidence.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/12/16/evidence-gathering-session-at-the-jiscmrd-launch-workshop/

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[1] JISC MRD01 Outputs,  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd/outputs.aspx

[2] Sudamih project, http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/

Research Data Catalogue: May is only a few months away……

Making Research Data Discoverable

As followers of this list will be aware, the IRDIUM project at Newcastle is taking a comprehensive ‘soup to nuts’ look at Research Data Management; all the way from scoping academic and funder requirements  through to what policies, guidance, tools, systems and training are needed to support them.

You may also know, particularly if you work anywhere near a Research Office, that come May the 1st 2012 EPSRC has asked that all Universities should have a road map to align their policies and procedures with the EPSRC research data management expectations. Through the Iridium project we have made significant headway here mainly by drafting up a Research Data Management Policy and a supporting Code of Good Practice,  however we are missing an appropriate catalogue in which we can record what data we have and make it discoverable to others (a key requirement). With that in mind we  met to discuss what could be put in place and other groups may find our discussion useful.

To start with we decided that the system we are going to put in place for May 1st will not be a repository but rather a straight forward web-based searchable catalogue of data and that we will only collect information on data that supports publication. We have opted for this measure as we know that data supporting publication should have already been prepared (i.e. confidentiality respected through the scrubbing of data, fields marked sensibly etc) plus we feel that data is normally available at this point for peer review and as a matter of good scientific practice, so (hopefully) we’re not asking too much more from our academics to fill in data information at the same point they fill in their new publication info in our output system.

The main part of the meeting was concerned with which fields we want to use and these were:

Key Information for the system:

• File Type and Format (publically available)
• Size (publically available)
• Location (Private): resolved down to the most appropriate level e.g. file type, drive, URL or repository)
• Type specific  Key Words (public): Free text field, c. 250 character limit to describe the data resource
• Subject Specific key words (public): Free text field, c. 250 character limit to describe the data resource
• Distinct Title (public): Free text field, c 250 character limit
• Creator (Public): University user ID
• Submission Date (Public)
• Funder / Owner  (Either Private or Public)
• Terms and Conditions (Private, available on request)
• Status (public): live, deleted, corrupted etc
• Last Access Date (private): Controlled through Access mechanism e.g updated by Research office

Related Objects

• University project Ref (Private)
• Publications (Public)
• Unique ref / DOI equivalent
• Upload time / date

Access

• Mechanism (suggest that this should run URO)
• Cost
• Our T & Cs (small number of boiler plate T& Cs)

Useful suggestions included; that we should have a change log for each field but that given the constraints there should be probably be controlled access after the upload and that, in future, we should have a method for allowing data re-users to add their own contextual information as a tag onto the data. Plus a very interesting question as to whether we could assign a non-financial value e.g. value to science and a suggestion that we could do that via publications link (4* pub = 4*data). Finally we’ll also look at linking our existing systems as this would add significantly to both the wealth of information held about the data and by making elements such as confidentiality and / or publications automatic.

We’re aiming to start working on this soon but as always we’d appreciate hearing from the anyone who can add anything or direct us to good examples of what’s already out there, please get in touch at niall.o’loughlin@ncl.ac.uk.

Handouts from the JISC MRD Meeting In Nottingham 2011

I’ve scanned in the handouts from the JISC MRD Meeting in Nottingham last December. In quick summary this contains the programme, the list of attendees, the summary of metrics and benefits provided by the RDMI project along with two fact-sheets on keeping research data safe. Hope it helps,

JISC Data Managment_r2

steve..

CERIF in Practice Workshop

I attended the (ARMA UK) CERIF in Practice workshop on Wednesday (7th Dec) and had interesting conversation with Keith Jeffrey from euroCRIS about what sort of information we should attach as metadata to our data in order to maximise its discoverability and utility and he suggested an interesting 3 level taxonomy.

1. The top level relates to the Discoverability of the Resource and could be based around the 15 Dublin Core elements
2. The second level is contextual and essentially covers the elements in cerif (notably; outcomes – publications, patents etc, funding; research council grant, person; project team members, organisation- Uni, collaborators.
3. Finally a specific level giving the minutiae.

This is quite appealing as we already collect much of the information in the first two levels through our current systems (MyProjects, e-prints and MyImpact) so the main additional input we’d be requiring from the academic would be at the third level.

Useful links:
http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml
http://www.eurocris.org

iridium JISC MRD02 project – November ’11

Progress to date

Workpackage 0 (Project Management)

• first Steering Group meeting arranged for 20 Dec 2011
• Management Group meeting took place on the 23 November 2011 to review progress against project plan and active workpackages
• nominations for Consultative Group membership have been requested
• applications for post-graduate students posts have been reviewed
• project plan uploaded to website

Workpackage 1 (Requirements)

• existing RDM surveys and lessons learnt from MRD01 discussed within project
• working group met on 10 November and created an internal project wiki page of RDM requirements gathering questions
• working group on 29 November took this forward to review formal questions for survey/face-to-face interviews and to discuss timeline for piloting

Workpackage 2 (Policy)

• existing RDM policies from other institutions reviewed within project
• working group met on 9November 2011 and authored internal project wiki page of initial RDM policy principles and practical application through ‘policy layering’ and ‘policy projection/space’ concepts

Workpackage 3 (Assessment of tools)

• this workpackage will begin when WP2 (Policy) is sufficiently progressed

Workpackage 4 (Assessment of systems)

• this workpackage has been initiated by Paul Haldane

Workpackage 9 (Dissemination)

• internal dissemination through iridium project mailing list and URC
• internal Research Office website pages for hyper linking noted and local publications identified
• external dissemination via website, blog and Twitter.
• Niall O’Loughlin attended RDMF7 event on 2-3 November 30 2011
• internal and external dissemination
• Martin Donnelly from DCC joined project internal mailing list
• Poster prepared for JISC MRD02 Programme Meeting on 1-2 December and to be attended by Steve McGough and Lindsay Wood

Activities in the last month

Risks & issues

Risk/issues likely to present in the coming 3 months are:

• team needs to be very clear that the iridium project is not about data storage space and to manage researchers’ expectations
• researchers do not give/identify their needs or that researchers’ needs are out of scope
• project highlights existing practice in data management that requires change
• until March 2012, preparation workload for researchers relating to REF14 will deter project engagement

Milestones & challenges

In the coming 3 months, identified milestones are:

• project plan accepted (with any necessary changes) and external reporting submission
• postgraduate students recruitment
• RDM requirements identified
• exemplar research projects identified and engaged
• local existing policies analysed
• preliminary set of recommendations for local RDM policy principles authored

Iridium JISC MRD02 project – October ’11

Progress to date

Workpackage 0 (Project Management)

• a full team Management Group meeting took place on the 17 October 2011 to formalise project team roles and conduct detailed project planning
• a job specification has been written and initial processes for recruitment of postgraduate research students has begun
• established project website[1], blog[2] and Twitter[3] account
• written and submitted project plan
• documented provisional dissemination strategy in project plan
• related external projects policy review begun
• regular internal and external reporting: project planning on schedule

Workpackage 1 (Requirements)

• working group assigned to take forward survey and face-to-face interviews
• identified need for a representative sample of researchers/projects

Workpackage 2 (Policy)

• working group to analyse existing related polices and formulate a draft institutional RDM policy for comment will meet on 9 November 2011

Workpackage 3 (Assessment of tools)

• survey of requirements from WP1 required

Workpackage 4 (Assessment of systems)

• survey of requirements from WP1 required

Workpackage 8 (Evaluation)

• preliminary discussions documented in project plan, to be developed further by Project Manager

Activities in the last month

• internal dissemination through full project team meeting on 17 October 2011
• communication lines identified
• website, blog and Twitter have been used to disseminate
• internal mailing list established and used to for project discussions and dissemination of Programme information, together with related projects/events
• extended stakeholder analysis completed
• project reported to at University Research Committee on 31 October 2011

Risks & issues

Risk analysis has been documented in project plan and a risk/issue log has been established on internal project management site.

Risk/issues likely to present in the coming 3 months are:

• team needs to be very clear that the iridium project is not about data storage space and to manage researchers’ expectations
• researchers do not give/ identify their needs or that researchers’ needs are out of scope
• project highlights existing practice in data management that requires change
• until March 2012, preparation workload for researchers relating to REF14 will deter project engagement

Milestones & challenges

In the coming 3 months, identified milestones are:

• project plan accepted and external reporting submission
• postgraduate students recruitment
• RDM requirements identification
• exemplar research projects engagement

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[1] http://research.ncl.ac.uk/iridium/

[2] https://iridiummrd.wordpress.com/

[3] http://www.twitter.com/iridium_mrd

Iridium JISC MRD02 project – reflecting on the first month

The iridium project aims to produce a complete holistic plan and infrastructure for Research Data Management (RDM) at Newcastle University, making data generated by research at the University both available and discoverable with effective curation throughout the full data lifecycle in consultation with the researchers who produce it. Specific objectives are: to determine current practice and future requirements; to produce an institutional RDM policy informed by the results; to support that policy by integrating data management tools and support into a pilot data management infrastructure.

The project will be based around the production of an institutional RDM policy by the University Research Office. This policy will be supported by the production of user support and tools by the Digital Institute, Information Systems & Services and the Library.

The project’s institutional web site is at research.ncl.ac.uk/iridium/ and we will also be using this blog (iridiummrd.wordpress.com) and our Twitter feed (twitter.com/iridium_mrd #iridiummrd #jiscmrd) to disseminate. The project’s internal mailing list has been well used and there has been some good discussion so far, some of which we hope to share as longer blog posts.

In the last month we have had a full project team planning meeting to add detail to the project plan (workpackages, stakeholder analysis, risk analysis, etc.) and arranging working groups for the early workpackages (e.g. WP1: Requirements and WP2: Policy). We have discussed the need to be clear to researchers about the projects’ aims and managing their expectations. The project has disseminated internally to the University Research Committee and we have started the process of recruiting postgraduate student to assist with the project.

Establishing reseachers’ requirements locally is key, initially through  surveys and face-to-face meetings as the outcome of this is required as a prerequisite for later workpackages. We have started to look at the body of work and outcomes completed through the previous JISC MRD01 programme and other related project. There are a lot! The project has identified some useful previous requirements surveys (DAF, Sudahmih, MaDAM, IDMB, ERIM, etc.), published policies (Edinburgh, Oxford, research funders, etc.) and data management online planning tools (CARDIO, DMP online). As Project Manager, I am seeing if a Custom Google MRD Search and Diigo collaborative bookmarking tools will assist in getting up to speed with previous work done in this area and noting previous project outputs.

Iridium is keeping an eye on RDM events and will be attend the Incentivising Data Management & Sharing event later in the month and of course the Programme start up meeting in December. These events are being added to our project calendar.

We are looking forward to sharing good practice and getting feedback from fellow projects. Iridium is following the JISCMRD list and we are adding project blog RSS feeds to a ‘MRD blog bundle‘ to keep up to date other good work and following the #jiscmrd hastag on Twitter. The links to other projects’ blogs are fast being released, which is great for ‘picking up’ ideas. I liked the straightforward ‘What is RDM‘ page added to the MiSS project site and the MRD reading list from the Orbital project in RefShare.

We will be posting regularly to the blog and welcome comments.