Open Exeter: Human Factors in Research Data Management This will be the blog for the JISC-funded "Open Exeter" project. It will include updates on project findings and general information of relevance to the project

  You can now view a timeline of the Open Exeter project on Storify.  Storify provided us with a useful way to illustrate the progression of the project and to chronicle the work which has been undertaken since the beginning, especially as it facilitates the inclusion of social media such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, among others. You can find information about our workshops and conference posters, tweets from our followers, videos of our Holistic Librarian training, as well as links to our PGR training, promotional materials and conference presentations.

Posted under News, Open Access, Useful links

Just a quick blog post to say that I recently discovered an interesting piece of software that might help in the data collection process. It is called Express Scribe and I find it greatly speeds up the transcription process. Essentially it is a piece of software through which you play the audio recording that is to be transcribed. You can then turn certain keys on your keyboard into hot keys or use a foot pedal so that you don’t have to move away from the word processing programme in order to pause and rewind the recording. I’m sure the pro version has many other features but I find the free version does everything I need it to.

On a related note, I’m very pleased I had the Echo Smart Pen with me today when conducting an interview as the battery of my digital audio recorder ran out. It turns out two bars just isn’t enough to get through an interview. I will need to make sure it is fully charged in future. Fortunately I was also recording the audio on my Smart Pen and although the audio isn’t as good as the Olympus digital recorder it is still perfectly audible.

Posted under Data management tools, Follow the Data, PGR students

Just a quick note to let you know that our Twitter account is now called “Open Research Exeter” – Follow us here: @OpenResearchExe

Our Facebook page has also been rebranded, so please like us to find out about the latest Open Exeter events, laugh at our photos and more!  www.facebook.com/openresearchexeter

Thanks and keep in touch!

Posted under Advocacy and Governance

We are very pleased to announce that the Open Exeter Project (http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/resources/openaccess/openexeter/) has been chosen as a finalist for a Professional Services Recognition Award in the Outstanding Project of the Year category at the University of Exeter.  You can see more about the awards here: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/staff/benefits/excellence/

We’d like to thank Senior Management for nominating us and for recognising the important work that the project has carried out in the areas of research data management, open access and research support.  The team has worked incredibly hard over the past eighteen months, achieving a huge amount in terms of outputs and kick-starting a slow but steady cultural change in the way research is shared, stored and managed around the University. It’s often been a struggle to get our messages across to the right people so the fact that we have received this nomination is fantastic.

The nomination includes members of the wider team from IT and RKT – a model for successful cross-departmental collaboration has been one of the strengths of the project and something we hope to build on in the future.

Keep your fingers crossed for us on 26^th June – at least we get to attend a drinks reception, a three-course dinner and hob-nob with the high and mighty even if we don’t win!

Jill Evans

Open Access & Data Curation Manager & Project Manager, Open Exeter

Posted under Advocacy and Governance, News

The morning of Friday 22nd March saw the University of Exeter’s newly rebranded repository Open Research Exeter (ORE) take over part of The Forum street and launch headlong into the world amid a flurry of promotional posters, postcards and even some slightly peculiarly coloured fairy cakes. Demos were given and chocolates were brandished at unsuspecting passing students and staff in conjunction with the promotion of other services for researchers at Exeter. The event went very well, with a good degree of passing custom and it felt great to be out there getting the message across about the newly merged repository and the benefits of Open Access to research papers, PGR theses and research data.

Later in that day we decamped, balloons aloft, across the campus and through the howling wind and rain to Reed Hall where a celebratory lunch was held for stakeholders and those from around the University who had supported the project since it began in October 2011. Michael Wykes, RKT’s Policy, Impact, and Performance Manager, toasted the successful conclusion of the Open Exeter Project before we tucked in to an abundant spread of delicious goodies. We would like to thank everyone for coming along to support us and we hope to continue to work closely with researchers and others from around the University to ensure that our project outputs are sustainable in the long-term.

If you have any questions about ORE, please contact rdm@exeter.ac.uk or openaccess@exeter.ac.uk.

Posted under News, Open Access

This week is a very busy one for us! Our Open Access Research and Research Data Management Policy for researchers goes before Senate on Thursday and on Friday we are celebrating the achievements of the Open Exeter project and launching our newly rebranded repository Open Exeter Research (ORE) for research papers, research data and theses.

You may remember the competition to rename the institutional repository which was part of our Open Access Week 2012 (see poster). We received a total of 57 entries from staff and students from all areas of the University and eventually decided on Open Research Exeter (or ORE). Our competition winner, Katie Kelsey, is a Temporary Research Fellow who suggested One Research Exeter. We adapted her suggestion slightly to incorporate the concept of making Exeter’s research open and available to the public including researchers across the globe. Congratulations Katie and hope you are enjoying your Kindle!

On Friday 22nd March, the Open Exeter team will be in the Forum Street on Streatham Campus from 10:00 – 12:00, to answer questions about the project and any other research data management and open access queries you may have. You will have the chance to see an ORE demo, and talk to those who developed the repository as well as other staff from RKT, Exeter IT and the Library who support research at Exeter. Come along and talk to us and you may get a free fairy cake!  You can even join the event on Facebook!

This will be followed by a celebratory lunch for stakeholders and others from around the University who have supported the Open Exeter project since its start date in October 2011. As we draw towards the end of the project, we hope to continue to work closely with researchers and others from around the University to ensure that our project outputs are sustainable in the long-term. In the meantime we will be making sure all is ready for ORE’s launch on Friday!

If you have any questions about ORE, please contact rdm@exeter.ac.uk or openaccess@exeter.ac.uk.

Posted under Exeter Data Archive, News, Open Access, Research, Technical development

The Open Access Research and Research Data Management Policy for PGR Students has been approved by the Board of the Faculty of Graduate Research. The Task and Finish Group who developed the policy felt that from the perspective of the University of Exeter researcher it would be clearer to include both research data management and Open Access to both research data and research papers in the same policy document. Further information will be provided about the procedures around the research data management element of the policy prior to October 2013 when we know in more detail how data upload to the University’s repository will work for PGR students.

The policy will be implemented in two stages:

1. PGR students who are funded by RCUK should comply with this policy with regards to research papers submitted for publication from 1st April 2013.

2. All PGR students should comply with this policy from 1st October 2013 with regards to research papers and research data.

The key points of the policy are as follows:

Research Papers

• PGR students should make the published research papers they produce whilst affiliated with the University (from the date of policy implementation) available on Open Access according to funder requirements and as soon as publisher restrictions will allow.
• It is anticipated that PGR research papers will be made available on Open Access via the green Open Access route, for example by depositing a copy of the paper in the institutional repository.
• Published research papers should include a short statement describing how and on what terms any supporting research data may be accessed.

Research Data

• PGR students should always comply with funder policy on research data management.
• PGR students and their supervisors should discuss and review research data management issues annually. A draft checklist to support PGRs and their supervisors in the annual research data review is available here.
• At the end of the degree, PGR students should register selected research data with the University’s institutional repository. When legally, commercially and ethically appropriate, this selected research data should be made available in an appropriate repository, for example a discipline-specific repository such as the Archaeology Data Service, or the University’s institutional repository.
• PGR students will be able to embargo their research data in order to have a period of privileged use of the data that they have created or collected.

The following links provide further help and guidance on Open Access and research data management for PGR students and their supervisors:

• Open Access guide for PGRs
• Guide for PGRs on how to deposit a copy of research paper in the institutional repository
• A draft guidance document for the research data management elements of the policy is available.
• A presentation about the new policy is available here.

Further help and advice is available via the Open Access and Data Curation Team on openaccess@exeter.ac.uk or rdm@exeter.ac.uk.

Posted under Advocacy and Governance, News, Open Access, PGR students, Research

We’ve made huge progress on our submission tool recently. We now have a prototype web app that collects metadata from users and uses Globus to transfer the files to our ATMOS storage facility before submitting them to Dspace.

I demonstrated this at the IDCC (International Digital Curation Conference) in Amsterdam last week and found many other delegates were either interested in the use of Globus or already had it at there organization BUT didn’t have it hooked into Dspace. Globus allows the user to create ‘endpoints’: data locations such as your laptop or PC that you can then transfer files from and to. The transfer happens asynchronously and as long as the endpoint hardware is on with Globus running, it will eventually complete and submit the entry in Dspace.

All this is added to the web app via an API and the deposit to Dspace as an atom request via SWORDv2. We have also implemented our Single Sign On (SSO) service.

We hope to have a finished prototype next month and aim to share our Dspace development with the wider community.

Posted under Technical development

Hi, I’m Afzal, your Subject Librarian for Arabic, and Politics.

Task 4: If a researcher came to you asking how they could share their research data with somebody external to the University what would you recommend?

What I knew about the topic beforehand:

That there are Facebook type networking sites for researchers of all disciplines such as www.researchgate.net where researchers can get to know one another’s work, and share meta-data and even collaborate to a limited extent but not in real time: this is through the usual means such as emailing, file attachments, web page sharing, perhaps you tube, LinkedIn.  Given the nature of research and links to funding there is reluctance to share Data in the way it is done within a department or institutional project.  

What I know now:

Whilst researchers can exchange their data via USB sticks, external hard drives even conventional post, there aren’t any data collaborative forums or ‘data internets’. This is because of the lack of standards, policies, and consensual sharing guidelines, differing copyright laws, university and institutional regulations which would satisfy researchers.

Sharing is practically limited to the researcher’s institution, where data sharing contracts would be in place.

How did you obtain this knowledge?

I came to the above answer by entering ‘data sharing researchers’ in Google. I didn’t really finding ‘Data Rooms’ where the world’s researchers come together and ‘chat data’ – (Of course, these data rooms would have protective security locks). The results invariably focused on individual organisations e.g. at Edinburgh. I was expecting some kind of inter-institutionally owned ‘data labs’.

What else would you like to know about the topic?

Where do we go from here given the emphases being placed on collaborative and group research at the funding level and Open Access at the output level. This surely cannot be limited to an individual institution anymore: for instance, how do researchers from Oxford, Bristol, and the Max Planck Institute share data – is progress being made to enable this?

How did you find this task? How would you improve it?

Disappointing answers owing to a lack of developed national strategy, which will not help us progress. To improve: provide ‘model’ responses to all the tasks.

Posted under Holistic Librarian, Training

Hi, I’m Diane Workman and I’m the Subject Librarian for Drama, English, Film Studies and Theology & Religion.

As part of the Holistic Librarian project I was asked to research three tasks of the ‘23 Things (+1) for Research Data Management’.

Task 10 was to research the answer to the question: “A researcher has used a secondary data set in their research. In which circumstances would she be able to put this on Open Access?”

What I knew about the topic beforehand:

I was unsure where to begin with this one, but felt that I should explore issues of Intellectual Property Rights (in relation to the original data creator) and ethics (in relation to the consent provided by participants in the original data collection).

What I know now:

It’s important to know the copyright situation for the data set that is being re-used. The researcher should establish whether the data set is still covered by copyright, and who the copyright owner is. Once they know this, they can contact the copyright owner to seek permission to publish their data set on an Open Access (OA ) basis. It’s possible that the original creator may have made their material freely available for re-use in one or both of the following ways:

• By applying a Creative Commons licence
• By depositing in a data centre with an OA policy

It’s also important to be clear about what informed consent was obtained from the participants in the original data collection by the data creator. Any consent form signed by them should have outlined any likely re-uses of the data, ideally specifying publication of the data set in an OA repository. This relies heavily on the original data creator making good provisions for the sharing and future use of the data that they collect, something that researchers should consider when developing their Data Management Plan. The University of Glasgow acknowledges that the process of placing data sets on OA may not always be straightforward:

“There can be a tension between abiding by data protection legislation and ethical guidelines, whilst fulfilling funder and public expectations to make research results available.” [Source: University of Glasgow website; section on data protection legislation and ethics].

How did I obtain this knowledge?:

I consulted several websites during the research for this question. It required reading around research data management more generally, as it relates to several issues. The following websites were all useful:

The Digital Curation Centre, and in particular their section on digital curation
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/what-digital-curation

The Incremental Project, part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/incremental/index.html

The University of Cambridge Support for Managing Research Data web pages, one of the Incremental Project partners
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/

The University of Glasgow Data Management Support for Researchers web pages, the other Incremental Project partner
http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/datamanagement/

The UK Data Archive at the University of Essex, and in particular their section on consent and ethics
http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/consent-ethics

What else would I like to know about this topic:

It would be useful to know more about the implications of the Data Protection Act on the re-use of data by researchers.

How did I find this task? How would I improve it?

This was the most difficult of the tasks that I was set, as there is no clear answer. Anything relating to IPR is usually not straightforward, and was further complicated when combined with the ethical aspect of the question. No single source provided an answer to the question, so it was necessary to draw my own conclusions based on the range of information sources consulted.

Posted under Holistic Librarian