Week 5, ANDS Project

Meeting with policy officer – very helpful and stopped me floundering quite so much when trying to write the policy.  However I have to do a consultation and implementation plan for the policy as well.  They had the suggestion that I do a spread sheet of other institutions policies so that the inclusion of the objective in the policy is as objective as possible. Frances from ANDS said that she already had one which I could use.

USQ does not have a procedure for

·         The retention and disposal of research data and primary materials.

·         What happens to research data when someone leaves the university either staff or postgraduate student.

·         Clear statement of ownership of who owns research data – applies to above.

Created first draft of data management life cycle.

One of the things arising from the ANDS Surgery web meeting was that we should ask the question – What can data management due for USQ?

Vision - What can data management due for USQ

Researchers

·         Education in data management – Version control, file naming protocols, planned back-up schedule (data protection).

·         Increase skills in research management.

·         Make explicit planned data management strategies to help project plan.

·         Provision of research friendly facilities, for instance research data storage space.

·         Awareness of University wide research to help drive within university collaboration.

·         Research data is archived in a protected storage area.

·         Clarity of who owns copyright and intellectual property of the project.

·         Don’t lose data assets incorrectly stored.

·         Aggregation of researcher needs to help drive University support

Faculty

·         Increase in higher degree student enquiry

·         Better able to quantify impact of all research carried out in faculty

·         Exit strategy for academics and postgraduate students to protect school knowledge retention.

Institution

·         Audit of all research activity carried out in the institution

·         Raise profile of research carried out by institution

·         Drives global collaboration links

Steering committee’s input

·         Makes the university compliant with code for responsible conduct of research

·         Makes the university compliant with University sector retention and disposal schedule.

·         Makes the university compliant for funding bodies.

·         Brings the University in line with international institutions.

·         Have consistent data management practices across the University.

·         Higher awareness of policy and strategy.

·         Leverage association with QCIF and use it effectively.

Terms of reference for steering committee

·         Provide oversight of project progress and provide quality assurance.

·         Manage project risk and ensure agreed project outcomes are delivered

·         Assist project manager in response to critical challenges for instance:

o   help to find solutions to problems

o   necessity for more funding.

o   Provide access to technical assistance.

Meeting with three people from the library one of the most important things to arise from the meeting is that I need to have a clear answer for how data management and the e-prints repository fit together.  To my mind they are complementary with the e-prints repository holding the papers and the metadata management system containing the pointers to where the data that the paper is based upon is stored and the metadata providing context for that data.

Re gathering data sets I contacted the person from the history faculty again but they said that they had not had time to think about it.  I included a copy of an historical photograph and a sample of how the metadata would look to describe it.  I have been sent the software from the climate centre so I can read the metadata easily and asked permission from the director if I can contact the researchers who wrote the papers.  The papers are organised by location and theme so if we can add some datasets will make a good collection.

Luis from ANDS helped me to become the data source administrator for USQ in the Research Data Australia site.

Week 4, ANDS Project

I met with the Director of the sciences pilot group re data collections who stated that a lot of their research was done with funding from a Board.  This board is funded from a subscription on farmers and Government funding.  This funding means that their research is commercial in confidence.  However we talked about providing an Excel spreadsheet for metadata entry next week and about using some older data such as lab notes.  He is in the middle of shifting offices due to construction so difficult.

I had a meeting with ICT who stated that it was very difficult to build a case for research ICT as they did not know how many researchers there were and what their requirements were.  Researchers tended to approach them on an individual basis.  However they wanted to do something and knew that they had to do something just not sure what would fit the needs of researchers.

Wednesday: Met with the person from the Arts pilot group who is interested in the project and wants an Arts voice in the Data Management discussion.

Has the following kinds of data:

·         Photographs

·         Magazine articles

·         Postcards

·         Oral histories etc.

Feels concerned that it is how she has put the collection of material together that adds to her research and that the metadata details her IP in the project.  I stated that we would complete the metadata with her input and that the intent is not to publish a data collection from research that is ongoing but rather when a project is completed.  She wanted it very clear that it was for the end of a project so that the publishing of a data collection does not sabotage her research.

Wanted to do what happens to a DOI landing page if the researcher leaves the University. – Note there is a policy on http://policy.usq.edu.au/policy/files/code%20of%20conduct%20for%20the%20responsible%20practice%20of%20research.htm but is this policy actually put in practice?

She said that she needed a lot of storage space for digital images and oral histories.  She currently has images stored which are burnt on CD/ DVD’s and uses an external hard drive that she takes with her when she leaves the University.  She has moved here around 8 months ago from another University and when she left she took all her research data with her.  No one informed her of any other policy.

ANDS meeting

Need to establish a vision of what the project is trying to do at USQ.

Steering committee 3 or 4 is the right number of members, we seem to have the mix right.

Need to ensure that you join the researcher to the researcher data.

The metadata must go into a metadata store.

Having metadata does not equate to free access.  Metadata means that the collection is exposed to discovery not necessarily reuse.

For uploading manual record

1. Identify research collection
2. Get the metadata
3. Then upload with ANDS walking you through that process.

12 out of 22 institutions are using ReDBox.

NLA party identifiers are for machine to machine use and they do not have a manual method yet.

Meeting with Climate pilot group to look at their metadata database.  It is a collection of papers organised around a location and then three different topic area.  I think this could work for the three initial collections. 

Note: when I had a look at the actual data it was published papers which does not qualify as a collection.  However they are all recent and I have asked the Directors persisson to talk to the authors to see if I could gain access to the data the papers were based upon which would be suitable but it is going to take longer they I have for the first three records.

Week 3, ANDS Project

Monday :  I took the regular meeting with Luis from ANDS and continued working on the project plan and policy.

Tuesday: I had a meeting with the USQ QCIF Representative, ICT working team and the steering committee.

Wednesday I attended the ANDS Community Day –Notes

·         ReDBox 1.5 now has better terminology

·         Jo Morris from Griffith Uni – Manager e-research

·         Retrospective collections made licencing issues more difficult.

·         People are beginning to carry out self data-citation in journal articles.

·         Griffith found minting DOI’s difficult but these issues have largely been improved since their project.

·         Use VIVO metadata management system

·         QUT: Also found dealing with retrospective data collections difficult

·         Need to make the difference between research data and metadata very clear to the researchers.

·         They used an EXCEL spread sheet to describe metadata elements.

·         Need to make sure that the data management template maps to the ethics form.

·         Need to make it clear to the researchers that they still control the research data.

·         QUT has workshops in data management and they still have 35 to 40 people attending each session.

·         Need to answer the question what is in data management for the researcher

·         QUT use the VIVO metadata management system

·         Download information from Research Master every three months

·         QUT and Griffith managed to sustain the momentum of the data management work by getting the DVC of Research to see the vision of having a research data management strategy in place.

·         Both Griffith and QUT have found that having a data management strategy and exposing research data has

o   Increased enquiry

o   Attracted more higher degree students

·         After the pilot project (seeding the commons) they had a visible sign of progress which could demonstrate the difference between having a data management strategy and not.

·         Increased executive interest in research to look at data as an asset. – it Changed the way the institution looked at data.

·         They had to have systems in place that would let researchers go in and change the metadata to increase the quality of the metadata. – Need some way of quality control for the metadata

·         In QUT the library was the driver

·         QUT and Griffith are not getting researchers to self-deposit research material, while James Cook is getting researchers to self-deposit.

·        Griffith have mapping ontologies from their research data database to RIF-CS

·         At Griffith researchers will not fill out online forms, they need to rely on faculty librarians to help collect metadata

·         JCU’s self depositing system connects to the HR system for researcher names, research system for grants and e-prints key word and FOR system.  It uses these connections to populate drop down boxes to minimise the users typing.

·         Users cutting and pasting from Word has proved difficult as the formatting artefact's make the XML non-compliant. 

·         UQ pointed out that you needed to define words such as collection

·         CQU used ReDBox for OAI-PMH used ACQUIRE from ReDBox and only captured completed projects

·         Duncan Dickinson:  They  found at Tern that a Creative Commons licence did not work for everything, so they had a lawyer draft a contract based on openness that states on what basis you can use the data for instance attribution – policy available

http://www.tern.org.au/datalicence

Duncan stated that ReDBox had good sustainability but you needed high level buy in.  He suggested that the mailing lists for ReDBox and VIVO are good and that Flinders and UON had good sites.

ReDBox is on a virtual machine at Nectar
Duncan summarised the day as it applied to ReDBox at https://sites.google.com/site/redboxmint/governance/redbox-community-day/community-day-ideas

·         Why a library is a good place for a data research repository

o   They are an enduring institution

o   Good at cataloguing

o   See role as digital curation and indexing

o   Can manage persistent link through DOI

o   Librarians prepared for and willing to look at changing requirements for things such as data citation

Purdue library is good resources available at http://www.lib.purdue.edu/scholarly/data.html

·         Have to remember that data management is not mature but is a still evolving discipline.

Research Data Australia (ANDS) have put together topic pages based on demand.  The page they have now is Tropics with its goal to gather all the research data in one place and raise profile.  Climate Change is probably the next one - Cynthia Love in charge of this area.

Thursday: Data Citation round table

Research Data Australia is hosted in the Nectar cloud and is therefore sustainable even if ANDS does not get further funding.

RIF-CS an International standard.

TIMS a people identifier

AND's is the minter of DOI's in Australia however the DOI is also automatically registered with Datacite

AND's is working with Thomson Reuter to get middleware for between RIF-CS=TR data.  Citation index (Crosswalk)

DOI's have to go to a landing page that describes the location of the data set.

National Library Australia (NLA) use party identifiers which is an indentification resolver - this lets you have various names for the same person identifier.

Griffith stores multiple personal identifiers dependent on need.

For data citations RIF-CS do not map one to one they have different mandatory and optional elements (Michelle QCIF talk)

Make sure that you include procedures on how to cite data in policy procedures

Total impact http://total-impact.org/ a free research impact tool.

Geoscience Australia looked at using Web of Knowledge and Scopus but decided to go with Google Scholar for financial reasons.

 

 

Week 2, ANDS Project

There a number of deliverables for weeks 1 to 8 in the project

·         A draft policy and procedure document

·         Communication strategy, completed and initiated

·         Completion of a project plan

·         Four sample RIF-CS with data accessible for re-use manually added to Research Data Australia

I have nearly finished the first draft of the project plan, just waiting to talk to ICT re the testing plan and exit and sustainability plan.

Made contact with Luis from ANDS who is providing support and a number of key contacts at USQ.

Attended a Webinar on writing data management policies on Thursday provided by ANDS.  This was presented by Frances Watson who included a number of examples which made attendance worthwhile