Category Archives: Roadmap progress

Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: February to April 2016

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The membership of the Research Data Service Virtual Team across four divisions of IS was confirmed and met for the first time (to replace the former action group meetings) on 11 February where it was agreed meetings would be held approximately every six weeks for information and decision-making.

In February, the DataShare metadata was mapped to the PURE metadata and staff in L&UC and Data Library trained each other for creating dataset records in Pure and reviewing submissions in DataShare. It was agreed that staff would create records in Pure for items deposited in DataShare until the company (Elsevier) provides a mechanism for automatically inputting records into Pure.

In March, Jisc announced that the University of Edinburgh was selected as a framework supplier for their new Research Data Management Shared Service.

A review of the existing ethics processes in each college is in progress with Jacqueline McMahon at the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) to create a University-wide ethics template. There is also engagement with the School ethics committees at the School of Health in Social Sciences (HiSS), Moray House School of Education (MHSE), Law and School of Social and Political Science (SPS) in CAHSS.

The Research Data Management and Sharing (RDMS) Coursera MOOC opened for enrolment on 1 March 2016. This was completed in partnership with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill CRADLE project. Research Data Management and Sharing (RDMS) MOOC stats from the Coursera Dashboard reveal that as of 23 May 2016, there have been 5,429 visitors and 1,526 active learners; 335 visitors have completed the course.

The large data sharing investigation was completed for DataShare and reported previously. (Two new releases in DataShare defined: upload and download). Upload release (2.1) to go live 23 May 2016.

PURE dataset functionality is now included in standard PURE and Research Data Management (RDM) training. There are now 210 dataset records in PURE.

Four PhD interns were hired in mid-March to act as College representatives for the IS Innovation Fund Pioneering Research Data Exhibition. They will be employed until mid-December 2016.

A total of 363 staff and postgraduates attended RDM courses and workshops during this quarter.

There were 30 new DMPonline users and 55 new plans created during this quarter.

There are now 210 dataset metadata records in PURE.

A total of 56 datasets were deposited in DataShare during this quarter.

The total number of DataStore users rose from 12,948 in the previous quarter to 13,239 in this quarter, an increase of 291 new users.

National and International Engagement Activities

In February

  • Stuart Lewis gave a DataVault presentation at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Amsterdam.

In March

  • A University news item was released to mark the launch of the Research Data Management and Sharing (RDMS) MOOC on Coursera. http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2016/dataskills-010316
  • Stuart MacDonald gave an RDM presentation to trainee physicians at the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh Course: Critical appraisal and research for trainees, Edinburgh. http://www.slideshare.net/smacdon2/rdm-for-trainee-physicians
  • Three delegates from Göttingen University were hosted here. The delegates have shared interests in RDM and visited to gain more insight into RDM support and experiences here.
  • Robin Rice gave an invited talk about the RDMS MOOC and web-based Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) tool to Learning, Teaching and Web and elearning@Ed Showcase and Network monthly gathering.

In April

As part of my responsibilities to cover the one year interim of Kerry Miller’s maternity leave, I will be writing blogs for this page until Kerry returns next summer.

Prior to this post, I worked the past 12 years as the geospatial metadata co-ordinator at EDINA. My primary role was to promote and support research data management and sharing amongst UK researchers and students using spatial data and geographical information.

Tony Mathys
Research Data Management Service Co-ordinator


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Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: November 2015 – January 2016

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Data Seal of Approval have awarded DataShare Trusted Repository status their assessment of our service can be read at https://assessment.datasealofapproval.org/assessment_175/seal/html/. In addition a major new release of DataShare was completed in November, this makes the code open in Github as well as making general improvements to the look and feel of the website.

The ‘interim’ DataVault is now in final testing and will be rolled out on a request basis to those researchers who can demonstrate an urgent need to use the service now rather than waiting until the final version is ready later this year. The phase three funding for development of the DataVault has been received from Jisc, this runs from March to August, so the final version should be ready for launch sometime after this.  The project was presented at the International Digital Curation Conference in February 2016.

Over the three month period a total of 328 staff and PGR™s have attended a RDM course or workshop.

Work on the MANTRA MOOC is expected to be finalised in February and launched on 1st March, at the following URL: https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-management

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Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: August – October 2015

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The RDM Roadmap 2.0 has been completed, approved, and published online and work has started on achieving the deliverables. A copy of the Roadmap is publicly available on the RDM webpages and can be downloaded from http://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files//uoe-rdm-roadmap_-_v2_0.pdf.

The RDM Services brochure has now been published in both paper and electronic form and is proving very popular with researchers. The electronic version can be downloaded from http://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/rdm_service_a5_booklet_0.pdf

Work on DataVault is progressing well and an interim DataVault service is now nearly complete. The Software Sustainability Institute has worked with the DataVault team to road test the interim solution, as a result some optimisations to the process were identified and are being coded up. DataVault user events have been held in both Manchester and Edinburgh, both events were well attended and the general impression of the current DataVault functionality was positive. Further, round three, funding is being sought from Jisc in December to continue this joint development effort.

Jisc has provided funding for up to nine PhD students to be employed one day per week for four months within their school. Their role will be to help researchers within their school record their research data as Datasets in the PURE system, and to direct any RDM or DMP queries to the RDM team for further support. The Dataset records in PURE will provide the Edinburgh University contribution to the national Research Data Discovery Service, this will increase the discoverability of Edinburgh data and ensure that more researchers are meeting the requirements of their research funders to make their data discoverable and reusable. Applications for the first set of three PhD student interns have been received and are currently being shortlisted, the successful applicants should be able to begin work before the end of 2015.

In October some minor questions were received about the DataShare application for Data Seal of Approval (DSA), these were responded to and DataShare has now been approved for the DSA. This is a major achievement for the entire DataShare team who have worked hard to make DataShare a Trusted Digital Repository.

Over the three month period a total of 173 staff and PGR’s have attended a RDM course or workshop, an additional 20-25 staff have attended research committee meetings or small group presentations where RDM has been on the agenda. Both regular and on demand RDM sessions (courses, workshops, & presentations) will continue to be offered and we are currently in the process of scheduling 30 courses, workshops for January to June 2016 as well as a number of presentations.

The “Data Management and Sharing� Coursera MOOC is well under way with a December launch anticipated. Sarah Jones, DCC, is our video instructor, using scripts adapted from MANTRA.

National and International Engagement Activities

10th August meeting in London with other Alan Turing Institute members to discuss RDM requirements to be provided by member institutions.

17th of August a one day RDM event was organised for Danish visitors from the University of Copenhagen to present UoE RDM services, outreach activities and ELNs.

31st August Dealing with Data conference.

7th/8th September meeting with Gottingen University to talk about digital scholarship, including RDM.

7th October DataVault engagement event at Manchester University.

29 October, Educause conference, Indianapolis. Robin Rice was on a panel with Jan Cheetham & Brianna Marshall, University of Wisconsin and Rory Macneil, RSpace: “Drivers and responses toward research data management maturity: transatlantic perspectives.

Kerry Miller

RDM Service Co-Ordinator

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Jisc Data Vault update

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Posted on behalf of Claire Knowles

Research data are being generated at an ever-increasing rate. This brings challenges in how to store, analyse, and care for the data. Part of this problem is the long term stewardship of researchers’ private data and associated files that need a safe and secure home for the medium to long term.

PrintThe Data Vault project, funded by the Jisc #DataSpring programme seeks to define and develop a Data Vault software platform that will allow data creators to describe and store their data safely in one of the growing number of options for archival storage. This may include cloud solutions, shared storage systems, or local infrastructure.

Future users of the Data Vault are invited to Edinburgh on 5th November, to help shape the development work through discussions on: use cases, example data, retention policies, and metadata with the project team.

Book your place at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/data-vault-community-event-edinburgh-tickets-18900011443

The aims of the second phase of the project are to deliver a first complete version of the platform by the end of November, including:

  • Authentication and authorisation
  • Integration with more storage options
  • Management / monitoring interface
  • Example interface to CRIS (PURE)
  • Development of retention and review policy
  • Scalability testing

Working towards these goals the project team have had monthly face-to-face meetings, with regular Skype calls in between. The development work is progressing steadily, as you can see via the Github repository: https://github.com/DataVault, where there have now been over 300 commits. Progress is also tracked on the open Project Plan where anyone can add comments.

So remember, remember the 5th November and book your ticket.

Claire Knowles, Library & University Collections, on behalf of the JISC Data Vault Project Team

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Edinburgh DataShare – new features for users and depositors

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I was asked recently on Twitter if our data library was still happily using DSpace for data – the topic of a 2009 presentation I gave at a DSpace User Group meeting. In responding (answer: yes!) I recalled that I’d intended to blog about some of the rich new features we’ve either adopted from the open source community or developed ourselves to deliver our data users and depositors a better service and fulfill deliverables in the University’s Research Data Management Roadmap.

Edinburgh DataShare was built as an output of the DISC-UK DataShare project, which explored pathways for academics to share their research data over the Internet at the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Southampton (2007-2009). The repository is based on DSpace software, the most popular open source repository system in use, globally.  Managed by the Data Library team within Information Services, it is now a key component in the UoE’s Research Data Programme, endorsed by its academic-led steering group.

An open access, institutional data repository, Edinburgh DataShare currently holds 246 datasets across collections in 17 out of 22 communities (schools) of the University and is listed in the Re3data Registry of Research Data Repositories and indexed by Thomson-Reuters’ Data Citation Index.

Last autumn, the university joined DataCite, an international standards body that assigns persistent identifiers in the form of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets. DOIs are now assigned to every item in the repository, and are included in the citation that appears on each landing page. This helps to ensure that even after the DataShare system no longer exists, as long as the data have a home, the DOI will be able to direct the user to the new location. Just as importantly, it helps data creators gain credit for their published data through proper data citation in textual publications, including their own journal articles that explain the results of their data analyses.

CaptureThe autumn release also streamlined our batch ingest process to assist depositors with large and voluminous data files by getting around the web upload front-end. Currently we are able to accept files up to 10 GB in size but we are being challenged to allow ever greater file sizes.

Making the most of metadata

Discover panel screenshot

Example from Geosciences community

Every landing page (home, community, collection) now has a ‘Discover’ panel giving top hits for each metadata field (such as subject classification, keyword, funder, data type, spatial coverage). The panel acts as a filter when drilling down to different levels,  allowing the most common values to be ‘discovered’ within each section.

 

 

 

 

 

The usage statistics at each level  are now publicly viewable as well, so depositors and others can see how often an item is viewed or downloaded. This is useful for many reasons. Users can see what is most useful in the repository; depositors can see if their datasets are being used; stakeholders can compare the success of different communities. By being completely open and transparent, this is a step towards ‘alt-metrics’ or alternative ways measuring scholarly or scientific impact. The repository is now also part of IRUS-UK, (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK), which uses the COUNTER standard to make repository usage statistics nationally comparable.

What’s coming?

Stay tuned for future improvements around a new look and feel, preview and display by data type, streaming support, bittorent downloading, and Linked Open Data.

Robin Rice
EDINA and Data Library

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Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: Jan – Feb 2015

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The Library and University Collections (L&UC) in association with project partner Manchester University received funding from the Jisc “Research Data Spring” programme to define and develop an open source Data Vault application which will allow data creators to describe and store data safely in one of the growing number of archival storage options. Phase 1 of the project started in March 2015.

The University of Edinburgh (UoE) were invited to contribute to a series of EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Compliance Case Studies. Stuart MacDonald, RDM Service Coordinator, was interviewed by Jisc and the DCC in relation to the RDM programme and institutional compliancy with forthcoming EPSRC research data expectations. The case study will be published on the Jisc website in May 2015.

RDM Service Coordinator Stuart MacDonald co-presented with Rory Macneil (RSpace) their practice paper “Service Integration to Enhance RDM: RSpace electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) case study� at the International Conference on Digital Curation (IDCC) in London (Feb 2015). The paper has been published in the International Journal of Digital Curation (http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/10.1.163), open access.

The RDM Service Coordinator also presented on ‘RDM Training Initiatives @ Edinburgh’ at the “Comparing Notes: Training Librarians for Research Data Management and Open Science Support� workshop at IDCC.

An EPSRC Expectations Awareness Survey was sent out to 98 EPSRC grant holders of which 38 responded. 9** grant holders agreed to participate in a follow-up interview. The findings of the interviews will follow shortly. Dr Evamaria Krause (Marburgh University, Germany) completed a 6 week internship with L&UC where she assisted with the EPSRC Expectations Awareness Survey and EPSRC grant holder interview exercises.

All Schools in the College of Humanities and Social Science (CHSS) have now added links to RDM Programme website and other RDM pages via their intranets. RDM Project Plan deadlines and deliverables which underpin the RDM Roadmap have been updated.* For more details visit the RDM Programme wiki (some content only available to UoE staff).

Four tailored Data Management Plans sessions have been organised with research groups in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and CHSS, and two workshops for the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) conference in Edinburgh are scheduled to run in June 2015.

Edinburgh DataShare release 1.71 has been announced with new features including faceted browsing, SOLR usage statistics, size limit on web deposit of Items increased from 5Gb to 10Gb.

DataSync (a Dropbox-like service in development) was themed and made available for beta testing to Information Services colleagues.

Links:

* IT Infrastructure input pending
** 1 PhD student who was forwarded the survey agreed to be interviewed

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Data Vault project kickoff meeting

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Last week, members of the Data Vault project got together for the kickoff meeting.  Hosted at the University of Manchester Library, we were able to discuss the project plan, milestones for the three month project, agreed terminology for parts of the system, and started to assign tasks to project members for the first month.

Being only three months long, the project is being run in three one-month chunks. These are defined as follows:

  1. Month 1: Define and Investigate: This phase will allow us to agree what the Data Vault should do, and how it does it,  Specifically it will look at:
    1. What are the use cases for the Data Vault
    2. How do we describe the system (create overview diagrams)
    3. How should the data be packed (metadata + data) for long term archival storage
    4. Develop example workflows for how the Data Vault could be used in the research process
    5. Examine the capabilities of archival storage systems to ensure they can support the proposed Data Vault
  2. Month 2: Requirements and Design: This phase will create the requirements specification and initial design of the system:
    1. Define the requirements specification
    2. Use the requirement specification to design the Data Vault system
  3. Month 3: Develop a Proof of Concept: This phase will seek to develop a minimal proof of concept that demonstrates the concept of the Data Vault:
    1. Deliver a working proof of concept that can describe and archive some data, and then retrieve it

At the end of month three, we will prepare for the second Jisc Data Spring sandpit workshop where we will seek to extend the project to take the prototype and develop it into a full system.

All of this is being documented in the project plan, which is a ‘living document’ that is constantly evolving as the project progresses.  The plan is online as a Google Document:

Look out for further blog posts during the month as we undertake the definitions and investigations!

Kickoff meeting

Originally posted on the Jisc Data Vault blog, April 7, 2015 by Stuart Lewis, Deputy Director, Library & University Collections.

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New release of Research Data MANTRA (Management Training) online course

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The Research Data MANTRA course is an open, online training course that provides instruction in good practice in research data management. There are nine interactive learning units on key topics such as data management planning, organising and formatting data, using shared data and licensing your own data, as well as four data handling tutorials with open datasets for use in R, SPSS, NVivo and ArcGIS.

This fourth release of MANTRA has been revised and systematically updated with new content, videos, reading lists, and interactive quizzes. Three of the data handling tutorials have been rewritten and tested for newer software versions too.

New content in the online learning modules with the September, 2014 release:

  • New video footage from previous interviewees and introducing Richard Rodger, Professor of Economic and Social History and Stephen Lawrie, Professor of Psychiatry & Neuro-Imaging
  • Big Data now in Research Data Explained
  • Data citation and ‘reproducible research’ added to Documentation and Metadata
  • Safe password practice and more on encryption in Storage and Security
  • Refined information about the DPA and IPR in Data Protection, Rights and Access
  • Linked Open Data and CC 4.0 and CC0 now covered in Sharing, Preservation & Licensing

MANTRA home pageThis release will also be more stable and more accessible due to back-end enhancements. The flow of the learning units and usability of quizzes have been improved based on testing and feedback. We have simplified our feedback form and added a four-star rating button to the home page. A YouTube playlist for each unit is available on the Data Library channel.

MANTRA was originally created with funding from Jisc and is maintained by EDINA and Data Library, a division of Information Services, University of Edinburgh. It is an integral part of the University’s Research Data Management Programme and is designed to be modular and self-paced for maximum convenience; it is a non-assessed training course targeted at postgraduate research students and early career researchers.

Data management skills enable researchers to better organise, document, store and share data, making research more reproducible and preserving it for future use. Researchers in 144 countries used MANTRA last year, which is available without registration from the website. Postgraduate training organisations in the UK, Canada, and Australia have used the Creative Commons licensed material in the Jorum repository to create their own training. The website also hosts a ‘training kit’ for librarians wishing to increase their skills in supporting Research Data Management.

Visit MANTRA and consider recommending it to your colleagues and research students this term! http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/

Usage Statistics

According to Google Analytics, the following organisation’s websites were the top ten referrers to the MANTRA website for the academic year 2013-2014 (discounting Data Library, EDINA and Information Services):

  • Institute for Academic Development, University of Edinburgh
  • LIS Links (India)
  • Digital Curation Centre
  • eScience Portal for New England Libraries at University of Massachusetts Medical Library
  • Oxford University
  • University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
  • Carleton University (Canada)
  • Glasgow University
  • Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
  • Jisc

Social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Slideshare provided a large number of referrals; several more came from other UK institutions, and HEIs in Australia, the rest of Europe, and North America—University Library pages especially. Forty percent of sessions came  from a referring website.

Visitors to MANTRA over the year came from 144 countries. Google searches accounted for 4,000 sessions, 25% of the total. Nearly ten thousand visits were from new users (based on IP addresses) over the year from 22nd August, 2013 – 23rd August, 2014. Here is a link to a Google Analytics summary spreadsheet extracted from our account.

We expect to have more detailed usage statistics over the forthcoming year due to moving the learning units out of the authoring software (Xerte Online Toolkits) onto the main MANTRA website.

Postscript, 15 Sept: See my Storify story, “Research Data MANTRA Buzz” to find out who’s been talking about MANTRA on twitter!

Robin Rice
Data Librarian

 

 

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Upcoming Dealing with Data Conference and RDM Service Launch

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The Edinburgh RDM team is a-buzz this week with preparations for the launch of our services, which will be carried out by the University’s Principal, Sir Timothy O’Shea in the Library next Tuesday morning, 26th August, 2014 with 120 stakeholders in attendance.

rdm-logo-finalAlthough the RDM Policy was passed by the University Court in May, 2011, and our RDM Roadmap work began in earnest in August 2012, it has taken until now to be sure our core services are ready for a formal launch. See this post by the RDM Services Coordinator for a recent snapshot of Roadmap progress.

The launch will be short and sweet–lasting no more than half an hour. But the event is enhanced by a mini-conference, featuring researchers discussing Dealing with Data from across the disciplinary spectrum. If they mention any of our services that will be a bonus for us! The programme is available now, and a summary will be posted after the event.

For those who want to follow live tweets, the hashtag will be #DWD2014. For those who attend, be sure and fill out the feedback form at https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/dealing_data-feedback!

Robin Rice on behalf of Cuna Ekmekcioglu (RDM team)

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RDM Roadmap: Completion of Phase 1

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The Research Data Management (RDM) Programme is well underway with planning and pilot activity (phase 0 of the RDM Roadmap), and initial roll-out of primary services (phase 1) completed. Services include:

  • DMPonline – an online tool by the Digital Curation Centre that assists researchers to produce an effective data management plan (DMP) to cater for the whole lifecycle of a project
  • Research Data Blog – set up by the RDM Action Group to communicate progress on the RDM programme.
  • RDM Website – a One Stop Shop for all university RDM materials (FAQs, key messages, RDM planning guidance, service guides)
  • Research Data MANTRA – an online course designed for researchers or others planning to manage digital data as part of the research process
  • Edinburgh DataShare – the online digital repository of multi-disciplinary research datasets produced at the University of Edinburgh
  • DataStore – a new central facility to store data actively used in current research activities. DataStore provides all researchers with a free at point of use allocation (currently 0.5TB). Researchers can assign up to 50% (0.25TB) of their free individual allocation to shared project spaces. Additional capacity can be purchased above this, with support for very large data (>1PB) hosting available.

Phase 2: (June 2014 – May 2015) will see continued rollout and maturation of services. Services in development include:

  • the Data Asset Registry (DAR) – a catalogue of data assets produced by researchers working for the University of Edinburgh to aid discovery access and reuse
  • the Data Vault – a secure, private and long-term ‘vault’ of data that is only accessible by the creator or their representative

We are currently gathering requirements to inform design of the DAR and Data Vault services. Upcoming Roadmap milestones will subsequently tackle requisite interoperation between existing and planned RDM services.

There are a number of different groups within the university and outside with whom we need to communicate our RDM programme. These include research active staff, support and administrative staff, university committees and groups (research policy group, library and IT committees, knowledge strategy committee) as well as external collaborators and stakeholders such as funding bodies etc. This is being done through a variety of communication activities including a range of training programmes on research data management (RDM) in the form of workshops, seminars and drop in sessions to help researchers with research data management issues along with formal and bespoke awareness raising sessions within schools for research and support staff. The clear message that we want to communicate is that the University is committed to and has invested in RDM services, training, and support, and that the University is supporting researchers, encouraging good research practice, and effecting culture change.

The RDM Services will be formally launched by the Principal on 26th August, 2014 along with an associated conference ‘Dealing with Data’ which offers researchers the opportunity to present on any aspect of the challenges and advances in working with data, particularly research data with novel methods of creating, using, storing, visualising or sharing data.

Stuart Macdonald

RDM Services Co-ordinator

 

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