An update on RDA and our Active DMP work, courtesy of Stephanie Simms
RDA Plenary 9
We had another productive gathering of #ActiveDMPs enthusiasts at the Research Data Alliance (RDA) plenary meeting in Barcelona (5-7 Apr). Just prior to the meet…
Author: sarah.jones
Privacy and Academic Research
This guest blog is courtesy of Marlon Domingus, community lead research data management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. It reflects on their experience of supporting privacy in academic research, providing an infographic as a case study.
It is not easy to make a case against safeguarding privacy in general. As citizens we expect our government and the businesses we purchase services from, to take the necessary measures to protect the data we are willing to share with them, given a specific context.
In the same way citizens, patients, data subjects or any other terms we use for participants in our research, expect their data to be protected by the researcher. If we make privacy the default in our research design, and document this in our data management plan, we can manage the sharing of data post-research more easily. This data sharing helps to contribute to debates in society and enables responsible public-private collaboration.
So, no sensible person objects to safeguarding privacy, a basic right for all. But, this begs the question of HOW? Not only within your own research projects, but also within the collective entity we call the “university”. To paraphrase Robert Maynard Hutchins: ‘a university is not only a series of schools and departments held together by a central heating system’, but also by safeguarding privacy for students, faculty, staff and data subjects. This aspiration can be seen as a moral maxim to:
‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.’
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
The infographic provides a helicopter view on implementing privacy in academic research. The images lead to underlying information; the frog perspective of safeguarding privacy yourself.
Privacy and Academic Research
This guest blog is courtesy of by Marlon Domingus, community lead research data management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. It reflects on their experience of supporting privacy in acadmeic research, provising a detailed inforgraphic as a case study.
It is not easy to make a case against safeguarding privacy in general. As citizens we expect our government and the businesses we purchase services from, to take the necessary measures to protect the data we are willing to share with them, given a specific context.
In the same way citizens, patients, data subjects or any other terms we use for participants in our research, expect their data to be protected by the researcher. If we make privacy the default in our research design, and document this in our data management plan, we can manage the sharing of data post-research more easily. This data sharing helps to contribute to debates in society and enables responsible public-private collaboration.
So, no sensible person objects to safeguarding privacy, a basic right for all. But, this begs the question of HOW? Not only within your own research projects, but also within the collective entity we call the “university”. To paraphrase Robert Maynard Hutchins: ‘a university is not only a series of schools and departments held together by a central heating system’, but also by safeguarding privacy for students, faculty, staff and data subjects. This aspiration can be seen as a moral maxim to:
‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.’
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
The infographic provides a helicopter view on implementing privacy in academic research. The images lead to underlying information; the frog perspective of safeguarding privacy yourself.
DMP themes: And then there were 14…
We issued a call for input on the DMP themes in late September and received feedback from across the UK, Europe and the USA. Many thanks to all who responded. It’s really helped to confirm our thinking.
We asked a few specific questions:
…
RDA in the UK: what role do you see?
This week saw the first RDA UK workshop hosted by Jisc in Birmingham. The Research Data Alliance is a community-driven organisation aiming to build the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing of data. Members come together throu…
A common set of themes for DMPs: seeking input
When the DCC revised DMPonline in 2013, we introduced the concept of themes to the tool. The themes represent the most common topics addressed in Data Management Plans (DMPs) and work like tags to associate questions and guidance. Questions within DMP …
FOSTER in Scandinavia
It was EARMA (#earmaac2016), the annual gathering of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators in Lulea this week, and Ivo and I were there donning our FOSTER hats to speak about open science in Horizon 2020. Ivo talked about the impact open science can have on proposals, sharing reviewer feedback he’s collated to show how positively (or negatively!) things can be perceived. It shows the strength that can be added to proposals when support is provided by the institution, and echoes the positive experiences we’ve seen in the UK where universities help researchers to craft robust DMPs.
My contribution to the conference is thanks to Vanessa Ravagni of the University of Trento. She proposed a session on Horizon 2020 to explain how open science is a key part of the daily workflow for research managers. I set the scene by explaining what is required by the European Commission in the Open Research Data pilot, and Vanessa and Niahm Brennan of Trinity College Dublin gave examples of how they have been supporting researchers at their universities. Both picked up on the need to engage with researchers to understand their concerns and Niahm gave a great list of typical questions, which resonate with what we’ve heard at DCC. The overlap between ethical approval processes and DMPs also came out in discussion and salutary lessons were shared about researchers being distraught at having to destroy really valuable data as this was written into consent agreements unwittingly.
It was a fleeting visit to Lulea for the FOSTER team, but enough time for dinner and a drink with the Trinity College Dublin cohort. Working our way through the gin menu and watching the sun slowly dip was the perfect end to the day. Next year EARMA will be in Valetta in Malta. It will be a few weeks earlier on 24-26 April, so all those planning to submit papers get ready to write your abstracts soon.
The FOSTER Scandi tour continues next week. We have a fully booked workshop on Wednesday 29th June on Open Science at the Core of Libraries. We’ll be demonstrating the FOSTER portal and doing group activity to define learning objectives and plan the content for new courses. Come prepared to work!
The 20:51 sprint (Roadmap team-building: UK edition)
This week we hosted the DMPTool team to flesh out our plans for ‘roadmap’ – the joint codebase we’re building together based on DMPonline and DMPTool. The key focus was reviewing and prioritising tasks for an initial release. &n…
DMPonline / DMPTool roadmap – reciprocal visits
Our collaboration with the DMPTool team continues. Marta was in Oakland at the end of May and we’re preparing to host the US team in Glasgow next week. We’ve been experiencing Californian weather for the past few weeks – hope it lasts long enough so they experience Scotland at its best.
Below is an update from Stephanie on Marta’s visit. We’ll post more news soon on the UK side of the trip.
Roadmap team-building exercises: US edition – reposted from the DMPTool blog
Last week we hosted Marta Ribeiro, the lead developer for DMPonline, for an intense, donut-fueled planning meeting to define our co-development process and consolidate our joint roadmap. The following is a debriefing on what we accomplished and what we identified as our next steps.
The project team is established, with Brian Riley joining as the DMPTool technical lead. Marta is busy completing the migration of DMPonline to Rails 4.2 to deposit the code into our new Github repository: DMPRoadmap. There’s nothing to see just yet—we’re in the midst of populating it with documentation about our process, roadmap, issues, etc. As soon as everything is in place, we’ll send word so that anyone who’s interested can track our progress. This will also allow us to begin sussing out how to incorporate external development efforts to benefit the larger DMP community. In addition, Marta is mentoring a pair of summer interns who are undertaking the internationalization work and building APIs. Meanwhile, Brian will finish building the servers for the Roadmap development and staging environments on AWS with another new member of the UC3 team: Jim Vanderveen (DevOps/Developer). Additional core team members include Stephanie Simms and Sarah Jones as Service/Project Managers, Marisa Strong as the Technical Manager, and the CDL UX team (many thanks to our UX Design Manager, Rachael Hu, for spending so much time with us!). UC3 and DCC will also rely on their existing user groups for testing and feedback on both sides of the pond.
Other groundlaying activities include a web accessibility evaluation for DMPonline to ensure that the new system is accessible for disabled users and exploring what we (and others) mean when we talk about “machine-readable DMPs.” Stephanie just received an RDA/US Data Share Fellowship to develop use cases for making DMPs machine readable, in consultation with the Active DMPs Interest Group and the research community at large. In line with this effort, she’ll be participating in an interdisciplinary and international workshop on active DMPs next month, co-hosted by CERN and the RDA group. We’re actively seeking and summarizing thoughts on the topic so please send us your ideas!
We conclude this edition with a draft of our project roadmap (below); it lists all of the features that we’ll be adding to the DMPonline codebase before we release the new platform. Most of the features already exist in the DMPTool and were slated for future enhancements to DMPonline. Stay tuned for our next update following a UC3 exchange visit to Glasgow/Edinburgh in mid June to prioritize the roadmap and commence co-development work.
Roadmap
- Migration to Rails v.4.2
- Bring DMP Assistant’s internationalization upstream for multi-lingual support
- Adding the concept of locales so specific organizations, funders, and templates can be defined and filtered out for certain users/contexts
- Shibboleth support through eduGain
- OAuth link for ORCID
- APIs to create plans, extract guidance, and generate usage statistics
- More robust institutional branding
- A lifecycle to indicate the status of plans and allow institutional access to plans
- Support for reviewing plans
- Public sharing option > Public DMPs library
- Flag test plans (to exclude them from usage stats)
- Email notification system
- Admin controls for assigning admin rights to others
- Export template with guidance
- Copy template option for creating new templates
- Copy plan option for creating new plans
- Toggle switch for navigating between Plan area and Admin area
Bumper week of FOSTER events
It has been a busy week for FOSTER open science events! David Ball and I have been in the Czech Republic speaking at open science days in Prague and Brno. Martin Donnelly spoke at the 2020 vision event in Oxford, and Joy Davidson is involved in a workshop in collaboration with UNESCO on open science for doctoral schools.
The Czech events have been well represented with speakers from current EC projects, including PASTEUR4OA, OpenAIRE and naturally FOSTER. It’s still early days in terms of open access in the Czech Republic. Several universities have publications repositories (usually based on DSpace) but there are few mandates and uptake is slow. The notion of sharing data openly is a big leap and seems a long way off. It was interesting discussing researchers’ attitudes over dinner. Some of the concerns about sharing are the same as elsewhere, but Jan explained there’s a more deep-seated resistance due to historical events. Being open could bring you into conflict with authority so it will take a lot more advocacy than in other contexts to convince researchers of the benefits.
I’ve found that the starting point of openness can be problematic in training events as some attendees immediately switch off if they don’t feel it applies to them and their data. I think this is a concern for FOSTER and the EC’s Open Data Pilot. More perhaps needs to be made of the benefits of data management per se, with open data sharing being one potential outcome where applicable. Even if data can’t be made openly available, they should still be managed. That message needs to come across more strongly.
David Ball gave an introduction to open access and reflected on studies conducted by PASTEUR4OA and FOSTER. One of these studies showed that the vast quantity of published articles (over 75%) are not deposited at all, but deposit rates are over four times higher for institutions with a mandatory policy. So there is clearly a benefit to having an open access policy. David recommended that policies insist on deposit once papers are accepted for publication and link deposit with research evaluation as these criteria are the most effective.
Two key themes to emerge in discussion were the need for advocacy and concerns about open access limiting the choice of where to deposit. When thinking about how best to communicate open access, David recommended avoiding standalone events. Embedding messages into faculty away days, researcher-led events, or meetings that senior management will already be at is preferable. Given the concerns about data sharing, the need for advocacy from research champions and persuasive examples that demonstrate the benefits to be gained will be essential in the Czech context.
Jana Kratěnová from the Technology Centre of the Academy of Sciences spoke about the Horizon 2020 requirements in more detail. She reflected on the tension between what funders requires and what publishers allow. The EC requirements mandate open access and expect publications to be shared within 6 or 12 months depending on the discipline. Some people are concerned about such policies restricting the choice of publisher, for example if researchers want to publish in a high-impact journal that doesn’t offer ‘gold’ options or allow self-archiving in the required timeframes. From the twitter stream it sounds like similar concerns were raised at the Oxford event too.
It was interesting to learn more about the open access position in the Czech Republic. Hana, Petra and their colleagues were excellent hosts. We had time to enjoy a wander around the old towns and were told about the local history. We also sampled the excellent wine and beer brewed at the Czech University of Life Sciences. Very tasty!