COPE Seminar: An Introductions to Publication Ethics, 13th May 2016, Oxford

Old books in my local second hand bookshop

The COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) Seminar: An Introductions to Publication Ethics, was held on Friday 13th May 2016, in Oxford. 

Being fairly new to this being an editor business, and the workshop being so local, I took the opportunity to go, and found it all really useful. Not only from my perspective as someone in charge of a journal, but also from the data management and publication point of view. A lot of the issues raised during the workshop, like attribution, authorship, plagiarism etc. are just as easily applied to datasets as they are to journal articles.

The workshop was a mixture of talks and discussion sessions, where we were given examples of actual cases that COPE had been told about, and we had to discuss and decide what the best course of action was. Then we were told what the response from the COPE members was in those particular cases - reassuringly we were pretty much in agreement in all cases!

Key notes that I jotted down during the day include:

• Retractions of papers are growing at a rate faster than publications
• An emerging area of concern is the growth of fake peer reviewers
• Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers are available on the COPE website, along with other guidelines
• Similarly, there are flowcharts on the COPE site to guide you through what to do if you suspect an ethical problem
• Report for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the culture of scientific research
• Academy of Medical Sciences -  Reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research
• Some authors will put in white quotation marks around text to get around plagiarism detection software

The main take home message for me was that COPE have a lot of resources on their website, all free to use. 

Data visualisation and the future of academic publishing, Oxford, 10 June 2016

Astrolabes at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford

Once again wearing my Editor-in-Chief hat, I was invited to the "Data visualisation and the future of academic publishing" workshop, hosted by University of Oxford and Oxford University Press on Friday 10th June 2016.

It was a pretty standard workshop format - lots of talks, but there were a wide variety of speakers, coming from a wide spread of backgrounds, which really helped make people think about the issues involved in data visualisation. I particularly enjoyed the interactive demonstrations from the speakers from the BBC and the Financial Times - both saying things that seem really obvious in retrospect, but are worth remembering when doing your own data visualisations (like keep it simple, and self contained, and make sure it tells a story).

For those who are interested, I've copied my (slightly edited) notes from the workshop below. Hopefully they'll make sense!

Richard O’Beirne (Digital Strategy Group, Oxford University Press)

• What is a figure? A scientific result converted into a collection of pixels
• Steep growth in "data visualisation" in Web of Science, PubMed
• Data visualisation in Review: Summary, Canada 2012 
• Infographics tell a story about datasets
• Preservation of visualisations is an issue
• OUP got funding to identify suitable datasets to create visualisations (using 3rd party tools) and embed them in papers

Mark Hahnel (figshare)

• Consistency of how you get to files on the internet is key
• Institutional instances of figshare now happening globally e.g. ir.stedwards.edu / stedwards.figshare.com
• Making files available in the internet allows the creation of a story
• How do you get credit? Citation counts? Not being done yet
• Files on the internet -> context -> visualisation
• Data FAIRport initiative - to join and support existing communities that try to realise and enable a situation where valuable scientific data is ‘FAIR’ in the sense of being Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable
• Hard to make visualisations scale!
• Open data and APIs make it easier to understand the context behind the stories
• Whose responsibility is it to look after these data visualisations?
• Need to make files human and machine readable - add sufficient metadata!
• Making things FAIR just allows people to build on stuff that has gone before - but it's easy to break if people don't share
• How to deal with long-tail data? Standardisation...

John Walton (Senior Broadcast Journalist, BBC News)

• Example of data visualisation of number of civilians killed by month in Syria 
• Visualisation has to make things clear - the layer of annotation around a dataset is really important
• Most interactive visualisations are bespoke
• It's helpful to keep things simple and clear!
• Explain the facts behind things with data visualisation, but not just to people who like hard numbers - also include human stories
• Lots of BBC web users are on mobile devices - need to take that into account
• Big driver for BBC content is sharing on social media - BBC spend time making the content rigourous and collaborating with academia
• Jihadism: tracking a month of deadly attacks- during the month there was about 600 deaths and ~700 attacks around the world
• Digest the information for your audience
• Keep interaction simple - remember different devices are used to access content

Rowan Wilson (Research Technology Specialist, University of Oxford)

• Creating cross walks for common types of research data to get it into Blender
• People aren't that used to navigating around 3 dimensional data - example imported into Minecraft (as sizeable proportion of the population are comfortable with navigating around that environment)
• Issues with confidentiality and data protection, data ownership, copyright and database rights, open licenses are good for data, but should consider waiving hard requirement for attribution, as cumbersome attribution lists will put people off using data
• Meshlab - tool to convert scientific data into Blender format

Felix Krawatzek (Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford)

• Visualising 150 years of correspondence between the US and Germany
• Letters (handwritten/typed) need significant resource and time to process them before they can be used 
• Software produced to systematically correct OCR mistakes
• Visualise the temporal dynamics of the letters
• Visualisation of political attitudes 
• Can correlate geographic data from the corpus with census data
• Always questions about availability of time or resources
• Crowdsourcing projects that tend to work are those that appeal to people's sense of wonder, or their human interest. Get more richly annotated data if can harness the power of crowds.
• Zooniverse created a byline to give the public credit for their work in Zooniverse projects

Andrea Rota (Technical Lead and Data Scientist. Pattrn)

• Origin of the platform: the Gaza platform - documenting atrocities of war, humanitarian and environmental crises
• "improving the global understanding of human evil"
• Not a data analysis tool - for visualisation and exploration
• Data in google sheets (no setup needed)
• Web-based editor to submit/approve new event data
• Information and computational politics - Actor Network Theory - network of human and non-human actors - how to cope with loss
• Pattrn platform for sharing of knowledge, data, tools and research, not for profit
• Computational agency - what are we trading in exxchange for short term convenience?
• "How to protect the future web from its founders' own frailty" Cory Doctorow 2016
• Issues with private data backends e.g. dependency on cloud proprietary systems
• Computational capacity - where do we run code? Computation is cheap, managing computation isn't easy

Alan Smith (Data Visualisation Editor, Financial Times)

• Gave a lovely example of bad chart published in the Times, and how it should have been presented
• Visuals need to carry the story
• Avoid chart junk!
• Good example of taking an academic chart and reformatting them to make the story clearer
• Graphics have impact on accompanying copy
• Opportunity to "start with the chart"
• Self-contained = good for social media sharing
• Fewer charts, but better
• Content should adapt to different platforms
• The Chart Doctor - monthly column in the FT
• Visualisation has a grammar and a vocabulary, it needs to be read, like written text

Scott Hale (Data Scientist, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford)

• Making existing tools easy to use, online interfaces to move from data file to visualisation
• Key: make it easy
• Plugin to Gephi to export data as javascript plugin for website
• L2project.org - compiles straight to javascript - write code once - attach tables/plot to html element. Interactive environment that can go straight into html page

Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran (Research Lecturer, Oxford e-Research Centre)

• All about Scientific Data journal
• Paper on survey about reproducibility - "More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments."
• FAIR principles
• isaexplorer to find and filter data descriptor documents

Philippa Matthews (Honorary Research Fellow, Nuffield Department of Medicine)

• Work is accessible if you know where to look
• Lots of researcher profiles on lots of different places  - LinkedIn, ResearchFish, ORCID,...
• Times for publication are long
• Spotted minor error with data in a supplementary data file - couldn't correct it
• Want to be able to share things better - especially entering dialogue with patients and research participants
• Want to publish a database of HBV epitopes - publish as a peer-reviewed journal aricle, but journals wary of publishing a live resource
• my response to this was to query the underlying assumption that at database needs to be published like a paper - again a casualty of the "papers are the only true academic output" meme.
• Public engagement - dynamic and engaging rather than static images e.g. Tropical medicine sketchbook  

3rd LEARN Workshop, Helsinki, June 2016

Cute bollard at Helsinki airport

The 3rd LEARN (Leaders Activating Research Networks) workshop on Research Data Management, “Make research data management policies work” was held in Helsinki on Tuesday 28th June. I was invited wearing my CODATA hat (as Editor-in-Chief for the Data Science Journal) to give the closing keynote about the Science International Accord "Open Data in a Big Data World".

The problem with doing closing talks is that so much of what I wanted to say had pretty much already been said by someone during the course of the day - sometimes even by me during the breakout sessions! Still, it was a really interesting workshop, with excellent discussion (despite the pall that Brexit cast over the coffee and lunchtime conversation - but that's a topic for another time).

There were three breakout session possibilities, of which the timings meant that you could go to two of them. 

I started with Group 3: Making possible and encouraging the reuse of data: incentives needed. This is my day job - taking data in from researchers, making it understandable and reusable, and figuring out ways to give them credit and rewards for doing so. And my group has been doing this for more than 2 decades, so I'm afraid I might have gone off on a bit of a rant. Regardless, we covered a lot, though mainly the old chestnuts of the promotion and tenure system being fixated on publications as the main academic output, the requirements for standards (especially for metadata - acknowledging just how difficult it would be to come up with a universal metadata standard applicable to all research data), and the fact that repositories can control (to a certain extent) the technology, but culture change still needs to happen. Though there were some positives on the culture change - I noted that journals are now pushing DOIs for data, and this has had an impact on people coming to us to get DOIs.

Next breakout group I went to was Group 1: Research Data services planning, implementation and governance. What surprised me in this session (maybe it shouldn't have) was just how far advanced the UK is when it comes to research data management policies and the likes, in comparison to other countries. This did mean that me and my other UK colleagues did get quizzed a fair bit about our experiences, which made sense. I had a bit of a different perspective from most of the other attendees - being a discipline-specific repository means that we can pick and choose what data we take in, unlike institutional repositories, who have to be more general. On being asked about what other services we provide, I did manage to name-drop JASMIN, in the context of a UK infrastructure for data analysis and storage. 

I think the key driver in the UK for getting research data management policies working was the Research Councils, and their policies, but also their willingness to stump up the cash to fund the work. A big push on institutional repositories was EPSRC's putting the onus on research institutions to manage EPSRC-funded research data. But the increasing importance of data, and people's increased interest in it, is coming from a wide range of drivers - funders, policies, journals, repositories, etc.

I understand that the talks and notes from the breakouts will be put up on the workshop website, but they're not up as of the time of me writing this. You can find the slides from my talk here.

RDA Plenary 6, DataCite and EPIC, and e-Infrastructures - Paris, September 2015

La Tour Eiffel

Last week was the 6th Plenary of the Research Data Alliance, held in Paris, France. It officially started on the Wednesday, but I was there from the Monday to take advantage of the other co-located events.

DataCite and EPIC -  Persistent Identifiers: Enabling Services for Data Intensive Research

Monday, September 21, 2015

This workshop consisted of a quick-fire selection of presentations  (12 of them!) all in the space of one afternoon, covering such topics as busting DOI myths; persistent identifiers other than DOIs; persistent identifiers for people (including ORCIDs and ISNI - including showing Brian May's ISNI account - linking his research with his music); persistent identifiers for use in climate science,the International GeoSample Number (ISGN) - persistent identifiers for physical samples; the THOR project - all about establishing seamless integration between articles, data, and researchers across the research lifecycle; and Making Data Count - a project to develop data level metrics.

(I also learned that DOIs are also assigned to movies, as part of their supply chain management)

Questions were collected via Google doc during the course of the workshop, and have all since been answered, which is very helpful! I understand that the slides presented at the workshop will also be collected and made available soon.

e-Infrastructures & RDA for data intensive science

Tuesday, 22 September, 2015

This was a day long event featuring several parallel streams. Of course, I went to the stream on Research Data infrastructures for Environmental related Societal Challenges, though I had to miss the afternoon session because of needing to be at the RDA co-chairs meeting (providing an update on my Working Group and also discussing important processes, like, what exactly happens when a Working Group finishes?) Thankfully, all the slides presented in that stream are available on the programme page.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the presentations at this workshop dealt with the importance of e-infrastructures to address the big changes we'll need to face as a result of things like climate change. There was also talk about the importance of de-fragmenting the infrastructure, across geographical,  technological and domain boundaries (RDA being a key part of these efforts).

A common thing in this, and the other RDA meetings, were analogies between data infrastructures and other infrastructures, like for water, or electricity. Users aren't worried about how the water or power gets to them, or the pipes, agreements and standards are generated. They just want to be able to get water when they turn the tap, and electricity when they flick a switch. Another interesting point was that there's a false dichotomy between social and technical solutions, what we really have is a technical solution with a social choice attached to it.

Common themes across the presentations were the sheer complexity of the data we're managing now, whether it's from climate science, oceanography, agriculture, and the needs to standardise, and fill in those gaps in infrastructure that exist now.

RDA 6th Plenary

Wednesday 23 to Fri 25th September, 2015

As ever, the RDA plenaries are a glorious festival of data, with many, many parallel streams, and even more interesting people to talk to! It's impossible to capture the whole event, even with my pages of notes.

If I can pick out a few themes though, these are them:

• Data is important to lots of people, and the RDA is a key part of keeping things going in the right direction.
• Infrastructures that exist aren't always interoperable - this needs to be changed for the vast quantities of data we'll be getting in the future.
• The RDA is all about building bridges, connecting people and creating solutions with people, not for them. 
• Uncertainty is the enemy of investment – shared information reduces uncertainty

Axelle Lemaire, Minister of State for Digital Technology, French Ministry of Economy, Industry and Digital Technology, said that people say that data are the oil of the 21st century, but this isn't such a good comparison – better to compare it to light – the more light gets diffused, the better it is, and the more the curtains are open the more light gets in. She is launching a public consultation on a digital bill she's preparing and is looking for views from people outside of France - the RDA will distribute the information about this consultation at a later date.

It's interesting now that the RDA has matured to the point that several working groups are either finished, or will be finished by the next plenary (though there is still some uncertainty what "finished" actually means). Given the 18 month lifespan of the working groups - that's enough time to build/develop something, but the actual time to get the community to adopt those outputs will be a lot longer. So there was plenty of discussion about what outputs could/should be, and how the adoption phase could be handled. I suspect that, even with all our discussions, no definite solution was found, so we'll have another phase of seeing what the working groups decide to do over the next few months.

This is of particular relevance to me, as my working group on Bibliometrics for Data is due to finish before the next plenary in March. We had a packed meeting room (standing room only!) which was great, and we achieved my main aim for the session, which was to decide what the final group outputs would be, and how to achieve them. Now we have a plan - hopefully the plan will work for us!

A key part of that plan is collecting information about what metrics data repositories already collect - if you are part of a library/repository, please take a look at this spreadsheet and add things we might have missed!

I went to the following working group and Birds of a Feather meetings:

• WG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Workflows
• All the collected workflows are now available as reference models
• Recommendations for newcomers: follow standards, start small and build components, document roles, workflows and services, trusted repository development
• WG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Bibliometrics
• We have a plan for our group outputs, which will basically map the landscape for data bibliometrics as it stands - identifying what needs to be done, and the other groups that are addressing aspects of this problem (which is a big one!)
• Joint meeting of IG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Cost Recovery for Data Centres
• We did a SWOT analysis of different methods for funding repositories
• BoF on Data Cultures, Practices, and Ethics
• Interesting stuff this, anthropologists and social scientists looking at how we deal with data as humans. Not directly relevant to me, but I think I'll keep half an eye on it purely out of personal interest.
• BoF on Earth System Science data management 
• This meeting was mostly presentations (as detailed in the agenda) but with a bit of time to discuss maybe setting up an interest group, though I don't think anything was formally decided.
• WG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services
• There were a few demonstrations made, which showed off how far the group has come in developing a potential new service. 
• Obviously, when ingesting links from several places, standards and interfaces are needed!
• Supporting RDA women networking breakfast
• An interesting meeting, despite it being held in a corner of the main marquee, so it was really difficult to get a proper conversation going. RDA is about 1/3 female, which is good, but given that more than 50% of Internet users are female, we need to be careful of the human aspect of our work. It was also very good to see several male RDA members in attendance too - this is not just a woman's issue!
• Joint meeting of IG Domain Repositories, IG Libraries for Research Data IG Long tail of research data & IG National Data Services: Building Connections between Libraries, Discipline Repositories and Data Services
• Again, the fragmented landscape of repositories came up - we'll need to help people navigate it and find the best places for their data
• There was some discussion about commercial data repositories, and the threat they pose to domain/institutional ones. My thoughts (as part of a domain repository) - I'd rather have the data with minimal metadata in a commercial repository than lost on a CD in a drawer somewhere. And the commercial companies are pressure on us to up our game. If we're losing researchers to them because it's easier to put data in the commercial repositories, then we either have to make it easier to put data into ours, or really explain why the pain is worth it!
• Joint meeting of IG RDA/WDS Publishing Data, WG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services, WG Data Description Registry Interoperability (DDRI), WG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Bibliometrics & WG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Workflows
• We had a lot of discussion about the structure of the Publishing Data Interest Group, now that most of the Working Groups under its umbrella are coming to an end. Personally, I think there's still a lot that this group can do - we haven't touched on issues like peer review of data for example, plus implementation and adoption of the working group outputs is going to take a while. But having a refresh of the group is probably a good thing too.

So, that was RDA Plenary 6. Next plenary will be held in Tokyo, Japan from the 1st to the 3rd of March 2016. In the meantime, we've got work to be getting on with!

2nd Data Management Workshop, University of Cologne, 28-29 November 2014

Cologne cathedral at night (and in the rain)

I was very honoured to be invited as a guest speaker at the 2nd Data Management Workshop, held at the University of Cologne on the 28-29 November 2014. 

It was a very interesting workshop, with many excellent national and international speakers. What was particularly good was its focus on interactions between the attendees - the coffee and lunch breaks were particularly long, which gave everyone the chance to really look at the many posters that had been submitted to the workshop, and talk to the people who were presenting them. The workshop proceedings will also be published as a special issue on data management in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information - I'm expecting further details of that to be on the workshop website in due course.

I took about 8 pages of hand-scribbled notes from the talks, so I won't be inflicting them all on you. Instead I'll just pull out the highlights that jumped out at me. The talks themselves were videoed, and will be made available on-line too.

The workshop opened with a pair of presentations from Stefan Winkler-Nees and Brit Redohl, both from the German Research Foundation (DFG), discussing the funding mechanisms in Germany for funding data management activities.They seemed very keen to receive more applications for data management funding!

Kevin Ashley (Digital Curation Centre) was next, giving an overview of the landscape of data management - highlighting the DCC guidance documents and Jisc's Research Data Spring, as well as the need for good research data management to root out cases of fraud, and aid data reuse. A key quote I jotted down was "Often your data tells stories that your publications do not."

Arnulf Christl (Metaspatial) gave an amusing and informative talk about open source software and what we can learn from it when it comes to open data. He made the very valid point that scientific data should be clearly licensed, as this allows attribution and credit to be given to the creators. He also showed the following video, which everyone enjoyed!



Tomi Kauppinen (Aalto University School of Science) spoke about linked data and our need for online tools to visualise and assess data, as well as the fact that linked data makes data, and data about data, machine processible.

Jane Greenberg (Dryad) gave an overview of the data publishing system in operation at Dryad, their guidance on data citation, and the costs involved in creating the Dryad metadata records. (This discussion of data publication was a theme that kept coming back throughout the workshop.)

Cyril Pommier (French National Institute for Agricultural Research, INRA) gave a talk about the data management difficulties in coupling phenotype with plant genome studies, for studies into crop security, adaption to climate change, etc. (Being a physicist, a lot of the science went straight over my head, but what I found fascinating was the fact that the data management problems being described were the same ones that we get in atmospheric science, so we may have more in common from a data management point of view, than not. Which made me think - how many of the solutions are applicable cross domains? We need to find out!)

The second day of the workshop kicked off with a pair of archaeological talks. Firstly was Gerd-Christian Weniger (Neanderthal Museum) talking about making 3D scans of items from the Pleistocene period, including Neanderthal fossils. They use Confluence, which is a business wiki, as their repository software, as it allows easy up- and download of data. These scans, and the high resolution surface scans of rock art and stone tools, allow research to be done without having to travel to where the original tool or fossil is actually held - opening up the artifacts for study by schools and teacher training.

Katie Green (Archaeology Data Service) gave a talk about how the ADS does what it does, touching on their workflows for ingest and data publication (with the journal Internet Archaeology, who are also publishing data papers). She talked about the Jisc project, investigating the value of ADS to the community (a related project looked at the BADC last year) - a synthesis report can be found here.

Marjan Grootveld (Data Archiving and Networked Services) talked about how DANS operates, specifically about their front office - back office model for dealing with researchers, where the front office provide guidance and information, while the back office deal with the technical aspects of storage and preservation. DANS provide training for front office staff, who can be embedded in university libraries and other locations. Another quote that resonated with me was: "Data management planning is more important than the plan".

Wolfram Horstmann (State and University Library of Gottingen) discussed data services and policies from universities, funding bodies and journals. He also differentiated between a "post hoc data library" which is strong in service reputation, but weak in subject specific expertise, with an "ad hoc data library", which has good subject specific knowledge, but often no recurrent funding. Of course, hybrids of these two exist.

And Hans Pfeiffenberger (Alfred Wegener Institute and Earth Systems Science Data) finished off the workshop with a discussion about data publication, giving examples of lessons that were learned from data papers published in ESSD. He also showed us that all these data publication issues are not new - Kepler's laws were based on Tycho Brahe's data and observations, which Kepler only got access to after Brahe's death. ESSD requires authors to describe the provenance of the data, the methods used to create/collect it, the limitations of the data, and provide estimates of the error. Reviewers must look at the data, and assess the consistency of the data and the article.

I'd like to thank the organisers again for inviting me to the workshop - and I hope to visit Cologne again sometime!

SpotOn London

This post is a bit "better late than never", even though it's been just over a month since SpotOn London happened. And I'm not too sure what I can actually say about the conference, other than it was amazing, and there was cake!

Actually, no, I can say more than that. SpotOn was an unusual conference for me in that I'm used to the traditional academic conferences where you have people presenting their latest research, followed by a few questions from the floor, and then on to the next thing. SpotOn was a series of sessions which were almost completely panel discussions, where questions from the floor made up the vast majority of the conversation. Add to that format science communicators, tools developers, researchers and policy makers, and you've a potent mix of people to really get the conversations going.

The whole thing was kicked off by Ben Goldacre's gloriously chaotic talk about, um data and randomised trials and stuff, featuring such nuggets of information as that it's possible to buy Uranium off Amazon (but they won't ship it to the UK) and some gleeful choices of words that made me glad I wasn't drinking tea at the time I heard them. 

The second keynote was given by Kamila Markram talking about the publishing process, and drivers for open science, in the context of frontiersin.org - a combination publishing and social networking platform for scientists.

Both keynotes (in fact, all the sessions) were videoed, so I recommend going and having a listen.

I got tapped to sit on the Data Reuse panel, along with Mark Hahnel of Fighare and Ross Mounce, even though my voice was still a bit ropey. Gratifyingly, the session was standing room only, and we covered topics including open data, reuse, credit for making data open, data publication and citation, peer-review of data and impact of data. (If you don't have time to watch the video the storify of the session does a good job of capturing all the main points, and a few asides too!)

The other things that have stuck in my mind (a month or so later) include:

• The Assessing Social Media Impact session, where we could tell we were making an impact because of the rapid number of spammers targeting the #solo12impact hashtag. (Storify here.)
• Preaching to the choir in the Incentivising Open Access and Open Science: Carrot and Stick session, where there was plenty of talk about making other people do things to make science open, but precious little about how to do it yourself. I subscribe to the view that it's either important, so we should do it, or it's not, so we shouldn't and should stop talking about it! And with the whole carrot and stick thing - yes, researchers are not donkeys, but they are human, and we are herd animals! Lead by example! (Storify is here.)
• The ScienceGrrl crowd - flying the flag for female scientists!
• The fact that of all the badges being given out, the first one to completely disappear was the one saying "Data is the new black"

All in all, a really good conference for meeting new people and getting fired up about all sorts of really cool stuff. I'll be back next year!

Citing Sensitive Data - workshop report

"Burned" DVD, microwaved to ensure total elimination of private data , by NightRStar

On the 29th October, I went to the British Library for a workshop on the topic of managing and citing sensitive data, one of a series of workshops all about data citation.

I won't go into the detail of what was said during the presentations as all the slides are available on-line here, and there's a good blog post summarising the workshop here.

I will take the opportunity to re-iterate what I said in my previous post about how citation doesn't equal open. Though I will expand on it further and say that there needs to be extremely good reasons for keeping data closed when public money has funded its collection (reasons along the lines of patient confidentiality, saving endangered species, etc, not "but I need extra time to write a paper!")

After all the presentations, we were split up into groups, and made to do some work, it being a workshop and all. First of all, we had to come up with some example scenarios for how to cite data given certain access conditions or embargos, and then we had to swap these with another group and try to solve them. This turned out to be a lot of fun, though I did somehow manage to wind up in the group that was threatening to fire people left, right and centre if they didn't behave!

The Yellow group were looking at access conditions for a study where different participants had given different levels of consent. The solutions they came up with were: 1) have an umbrella DOI for the whole dataset with multiple DOIs for the subsets with different access conditions. 2) Have a hierarchical DOI, or 3) have an umbrella DOI linking to subsets. The trade-off here was clarity versus nuance, and it was generally agreed that communities in different disciplines would have to decide the best approach. We also can't draw an inference on a subset of the data without taking the whole dataset into account.

The Red group were looking at embargoed data. First up was "researchers want to gain more research credit". Suggestions included: early deposit, while the embargo still is in play; access by request during embargo; DOI minted on deposit; open landing page in the repository (so people know the data exists, even if they can't access it yet) with end of embargo date on it; and the metadata should be specified on deposit too.

Next the Red group looked at the situation of longitudinal cohort studies which may change and have multi-layered embargoes. Access to variables could be dependent on layers of the dataset, with access to layers potentially increasing in time. The suggestion was to have multiple DOIs for multiple layers, with links between the landing pages to show how the layers fit together.

The Green group also looked at embargoes - specifically the situation where there was retrospective withdrawal of permission for a dataset and the data was embargoed while an investigation took place. (The assumption was that the DOI had already been minted for the dataset.) Suggested action was: retain the same landing page, but add text to it detailing the embargo and the expected date when the investigations would end (compliant with the institution's investigations policy). A user option to register to get notified when the dataset becomes un-embargoed would be a nice thing to have. When the investigation is complete, update the metadata depending on the results. And, at the beginning of the data collection, make sure that the permissions and data policy are set out clearly!

The Blue group were looking at access criteria, in two cases. Firstly was "White rhino numbers and GPS tracking information". The suggestions were: assigning a DOI to the analysed rather than raw data, and apply access conditions to the raw data so as to verify user credentials. The format of the public dataset could be varied, e.g. releasing it as snapshots instead of time series, or delaying the release of the dataset until the death of the tagged rhinos. Some of the rich descriptive data might also be kept back from the DataCite metadata store in order to protect the subjects.

The second scenario the Blue group looked at was animal experiments - medical testing on guinea pigs with photos and survival times. This one was noted as being difficult - though there was agreement that releasing data should be guided by funders and ethics committees. The metadata should not name individuals, and the possibility of embargoing data, or publishing subsets (without photos?) should be investigated.

In the general discussion afterwards it was (quite rightly!) pointed out that it's ok to cite and make available different levels of data (raw/processed) as raw data might well be completely incomprehensible to non-experts. We also had a lot of discussion about those two favourite topics in data citation - granularity and versioning. Happily enough, they'll be the subject of the next workshop, booked for Mon 3rd Dec. 

DataCite Summer Meeting June 2012

Sand castles by experts in Copenhagen

This is the last one of these posts - as it's the end of my notes from the Talinn/Copenhagen trip. Unfortunately it wasn't the last of the meetings I had to go to; the final one was a CODATA working group on data citation report drafting meeting, which doesn't have any presentation notes, but meant I missed the second half of the DataCite meeting.

Anyway, notes from the DataCite Summer Meeting presentations I did get to see are below:

NordBib conference notes, Copenhagen, June 2012

Inside the lecture theatre at the Black Diamond

The NordBib conference was all about Structural Frameworks for Open Digital Research
- Strategy, Policy & Infrastructure. I kind of fell into attending it by accident, as I was in Copenhagen for the OpenAIREplus workshop before it, and the DataCite meeting after it, so it seemed sensible to go to this one too.

It was an interesting conference, on one hand very high level, EU strategising, while on the other, the audience seemed to mainly consist of librarians and people interested in data without that much by way of actual concrete experience in data management. So I wound up having lots of conversations with lots of people, all interested in finding out what we in the UK and the NERC data centres have been up to.

All the presentations from the conference are available here (which kind of make my notes redundant, but nevermind!)

OpenAIREplus workshop notes - 11th June 2012, Copenhagen

The Black Diamond from the water - not a bad little conference venue!

“Linking Open Access publications to data – policy development and implementation"

The next stop in my marathon run of conferences/workshops/meetings was Copenhagen, and the Black Diamond, the home of the Royal Library of Denmark for the OpenAIREplus workshop and the Nordbib conference (more on that in a later post).

This post contains my notes from the presentations given as part of the OpenAIREplus workshop, and boy, they crammed a lot in there! Some really fascinating talks, and my only complaint would be that we didn't have enough time in the breakout sessions to really get into the meat of things. But given that we'd started at 8.30am, I'm not sure where we could have found any more time!

(Insert usual disclaimer about notes here...)

Some notes from "Editing in the Digital World: 11th EASE General Assembly and Conference"

A friendly face at Tallinn Technical University

I was invited to Tallinn to talk at the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) General Assembly and Conference, "Editing in the Digital World", to present in their session about "Publishing Data". I was very pleasantly surprised by how much interest the delegates had in this particular subject - in fact we had to move rooms for the session, as the first room was too small!

Unfortunately, I couldn't make notes of the session I was presenting in, and was only around for a couple of keynotes (as I had to head off to Copenhagen for yet more meetings - see future blog posts coming soon!). I did manage to take notes for the keynotes I was around for, and here they are, for your reading pleasure.

(As always, these are notes, so all errors grammatical, factual, spelling and otherwise are mine! No warranty is given, etc. etc. etc.)

The slides from my presentation can be found here.