Report on the Digital Repositories Workshop in Oxford

On Thursday 23 April, the Digital Repositories Workshop was held successfully at the Oxford e-Research Centre. It represented a bridge between the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project and the recently JISC funded, and soon to be unveiled, Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research (EIDCSR) project.

The workshop brought 37 delegates from a variety of colleges and departments in Oxford. The morning was dedicated to showcasing repository activities in the University. After this a technical session was held in the afternoon and this included a group task to address the following question:

"from your experience, what are the technical components required to manage and curate research data in Oxford, why and what developments are more urgent?"

A full report of the event as well as copies of the presentations can be found at:

http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/digitalrepository/Workshops-Repositories.xml

Digital Repositories Workshop: Tools and Infrastructure

An internal event, the Digital Repositories Workshop: Tools and Infrastructure,  organised under the auspices of the Oxford Digital Repositories Steering Group will take place on Thursday 23 April.

This workshop aims to provide an overall view of best practice in the deployment and use of digital repositories to manage digital content in Oxford. The event is only open to Members of the University of Oxford and Colleges. 

To register please email: Julia.Bremble@oerc.ox.ac.uk

The UKRDS Final Report

I have just discovered that the executive summary of the UKRDS Final Report has been published on their website. This summary reports an overall estimated savings delivered by a scale-up UKRDS service over a period of five years to be the financial equivalent of 63.5 FTEs . 

The report also offers the following 2 key recommendations:

1.     That a UKRDS is feasible and should be considered for funding over a period of at least 5 years;

2.     That in the first instance a 2-year Pathfinder phase should be funded at a cost of £5.31m.

The International Conference on the UKRDS tomorrow will certainly be a worthwhile and highly stimulating event.  

Datasets Seminar in Madrid

On Monday I will be participating in a seminar organized to discuss the issues around the inclusion of data in digital repositories. The event has been organized by the Consorcio Madroño, a consortium of universities in Madrid with the aim of fostering inter-library collaboration. The seminar will also bring Alicia Medina from UNED, Stuart Macdonald from the University of Edinburgh and Dr. Celia Russsell from Manchester University.

I have been told that the presentations will be filmed and made available on the web. As soon I know where I will post it here. 

 

Upcoming Project Workshop - 20th October

The Institutional and National Services for Research Data Management Workshop is the second event organized as part of the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project. 

Speakers from San Diego Supercomputer Centre, the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service and the NERC Environmental Bioinformatics Centre will show through examples and case studies the types of research data services that could potentially be delivered at Oxford. After this, a panel formed by representatives of Oxford service providers will discuss their role in supporting researchers with their data management.

To find more information and register please visit:

http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/digitalrepository/Workshops-DataServices.xml

JISC Innovation Forum: Research data-Whose problem is it?

On the 15th and 16th of July the JISC Innovation Forum took place at Keele University. One of the four themes of the forum was research data and it included three sessions:

 - legal and policy 

 - capacity and skills

 - technical and infrastructure     

These sessions generated a lot of interesting discussion and are blogged at: http://jif08.jiscinvolve.org/theme-2-the-challenges-of-research-data/ 

Particularly useful to this project is Matthew Dowey's summed up of the brainstorm on the technical&infrastructure session with the four priority areas for JISC:

   1. within a research environment – can we facilitiate the data curation using the carrot of sharing systems? (IT systems in the lab)

   2. additional context beyond the metadata

   3. how do we help institutions understand their infrastructural needs

   4. what has to happen with the various dataset systems (fedora etc) to help them link with the library and institutional systems

Research Data Management Workshop

I am glad to announce the first event organized under the umbrella of the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management. This first workshop is aimed at Oxford researchers to hear about good examples and interesting practice on data management across disciplines. So far we have secure an outstanding group of speakers and I am sure it will be a extremely useful event for researchers in Oxford.

To find out more information and register go to : www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/digitalrepository/Workshops.xml

A UK Research Data Management Forum

The UK Research Data Management Forum inaugural workshop was organized by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the Research Information Network (RIN). A mixed audience  formed by staff from data centres, data managers, some research councils, JISC, librarians, repository managers and IT specialists came together to hear about, discuss and share ideas around data management.

Michael Jubb, Director of RIN, gave the keynote address delving on RIN's Research Data Principles. A number of data categorizations were mentioned to show the variety and inconsistency of those and it was highlighted the need to reward researchers for making their data available.

Martin Lewis, Director of Library Services and Librarian at the University of Sheffield , talked about the division of responsibilities between data centres, institutions, libraries and others pointing out the need for a national data strategy. After this he introduced the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) , a feasibility study to assess costs of a national share service to deal with research data generated in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It is worth mentioning here that Oxford is participating in the UKRDS as one of the four case studies.

The next presentation brought Mark Thorley, NERC's Data Management Coordinator,  to discuss how to provide appropriate skills in data curation. Mark pointed out the importance of understanding why data needs to be managed to help identifying the skills needed and proposed three key players : researchers, data managers and informaticians. The shortage of data managers and the need to professionalize their career were also issues raised in this presentation.

Finally, the breakout sessions had the mission of discussing the remit of the forum and suggest what could the DCC  do to help providing appropriate skills for data curation. Most attendees agreed on the usefulness of having this forum to discuss practical issues but also recognized that a lobbying group is also required. It was noted throughout the workshop that dealing with the data deluge is a huge task and there is a need to provide evidence of the benefits of curating research data and nurturing a workforce of data managers.

 

 

 

Licensing your data

Last Friday I attended the seminar "Implementing Open Data: the Open Data Commons project" at the Oxford Internet Institute. Jordan Hatcher, a lawyer and researcher working on IP issues,  explained how the concept of open data shares principles with those of open source and free software, i.e. data will be available for re-use by the public without  any further licensing or permission needed. 

Jordan pointed out that data can be protected by copyright and database rights and how those require permission in the form of a licence. But in case the data producer or rightsholder wants to openly share the data, then there is no easy way to do this.

The Open Data Commons project has developed a set of licences, in draft form, based on the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data that attempt to address this key legal data dissemination issue. 

In relation to these efforts, it is worth pointing out the work carried out by the DART (Dataset Acquisition, Accesibility and Annotation e-Research Technologies) project developing tools and services to enable their researchers to make use of licences to disseminate their data (also based on the Science Commons Initiative).