The Data Cycle: Managing and Sharing Data
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Transcript The Data Cycle: Managing and Sharing Data
The Data Cycle:
Managing & Sharing Data
Dr Tim Brooks and Julie Scott
Research, Development
& Commercial Services
Wednesday 13 June 2012
Session content
What is data?
Why make data publicly available?
How to share your data
Planning for preservation
What Anglia Ruskin University is doing
What is data?
Numerical, statistical, quantitative
Interview transcripts & other qualitative data
Video
Audio
Photographs & other (digital) images
Why make data publicly available
(for the research community)?
Encourages scientific enquiry & debate
Encourages innovation & new data users
Leads to new collaborations between data users
& data creators
Maximises transparency & accountability
Increases the visibility of research
Encourages the improvement & validation of
research methods
Reduces the cost of duplicating research data
Why make data publicly available
(for you, the researcher)?
Part of good research practice
Funding body requirement (data management
plan) or journal publication requirement
Codes of Practice
Peer approval
Citations
Enhances value of research
On-line accessibility
Why make data publicly available
(practical reasons)?
Freedom of information requests
Data not lost when researchers move on
Data remains accessible over time
Reasons not to share data?
Want to publish work before anyone sees the
data?
Time/money & other practical constraints?
Participants may not give consent?
Audio-visual data – can’t be anonymised?
Data not of interest to anyone else?
Risks?
Breach of confidentiality to research participants
Institutional/personal – exposure of data
May be legal, ethical & commercial restraints
Increased costs
Version control
Software updates & changes
Data theft
Funders & data sharing
Funding bodies have different
expectations/requirements/approaches
Funding bodies which encourage data
sharing (1)
Mandate researchers to offer research data
generated through research grants to
designated data centres (e.g. UK Data Archive &
NERC Data Centres)
Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
National Environment Research Council (NERC)
British Academy
Funding bodies which encourage data
sharing (2)
Encourage data sharing in timely manner –
Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council
(BBSRC), Medical Research Council (MRC) & Wellcome
Trust
Research programmes funded by multiple agencies
may mandate data sharing (e.g. cross-disciplinary Rural
Economy & Land Use Programme)
Research councils fund data infrastructures & data
support services to facilitate data sharing within their
subject domain
Funding bodies which encourage data
sharing (3)
Economic & Social Research Council
(EPSRC)- 9 expectations & institutions
need to ensure compliance by May 2015
Most funders require data managing &
sharing plans for grant applications
How to share your data
Send to a specialist data centre, data archive or
data bank
Submit data to a journal in support of a paper
Deposit in an Institutional repository
Post to Project or institutional website
Share directly with other researchers (Peer-topeer) basis
Responsibility moving towards HEIs rather than
specialist centres
Advantages of depositing in specialist
data centre
Quality standards
Long-term preservation
Data backed up regularly
Licensing arrangements
Standardised citation mechanism
Monitoring secondary use of data
Management of access to data & user queries
Examples of research data centres
UK Data Archive
History Data Service
UK Solar System Data Centre
National Biodiversity Network
Petrological Database of the Ocean Floor
Who does responsibility lie with?
Researchers
IT staff
Support staff
Institutions
External collaborators
Planning for preservation (1)
Ethics
- Consent
- Participant information sheet
- Anonymisation, if possible & desirable?
Planning for preservation (2)
Good research practice
Must plan throughout research lifecycle
Metadata
Types of documents stored e.g. photos
Can all be stored electronically?
Planning for preservation (3)
Quality assurance/data validation
Storage options
Version control
Document suites
Handling updates to data
Data curation (maintaining, preserving &
adding value to digital research data
throughout its lifecycle)
Common elements of data management
plan (DMP)
Which data will be generated
Metadata, standards & quality assurance
measures
Plans for sharing data
Ethical & legal issues or restrictions on data
sharing
Copyright & intellectual property rights of data
Data-storage & back-up measures
Data management roles & responsibilities
Costing or resourcing needed
DMP Online
Digital Curation Centre (DCC) launched DMP
online in April 2010
Web-based tool
Researchers can create, store & update multiple
versions of a data management plan at the grant
application stage
Can be customised
What Anglia Ruskin University is doing
Roadmap for Economic & Social Research
Council (EPSRC)
Service gap analysis
Business Plan
Training sessions
Institutional repository – ARRO
Background information
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ Digital Curation Centre [accessed
8 June 2012]
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/Pages/default.aspx EPSRC
[accessed 8 June 2012]
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Pages/Home.aspx Research
Councils UK [Accessed 8 June 2012]
University of Essex (2011) Managing & Sharing Data,
UK Data Archive, Best Practice for Researchers.
Any questions?