Attendees: Graham Hart (Chair), Tito Castillo (DMP-SS Principal Investigator), Stelios Alexandrakis (DMP-SS Project Manager and Lead Developer), Martin Donnelly (Project Manager DMPOnline, Digital Curation Centre), Jacky Pallas (Platform Technologies), Rachel Knowles (UK Birth Cohort Study), Trevor Peacock (AISC), Mike Sievwright (AISC), Peter Dukes (MRC Head Office), Julie Withey (MRC Unit of Lifelong Health and Ageing), Martin Moyle (UCL Library Service, Deputising for Paul Ayris)

On Friday 17th February 2012 we convened the first meeting of the Research Data Management Steering Group. Chaired by Professor Graham Hart, the Dean of the Faculty of Population Health Sciences at UCL, the Steering Group has been constituted to address issues that emerge from the DMP-SS project and our collaboration with the Digital Curation Centre.

The meeting drew from relevant expertise and stakeholders from both within UCL and the wider academic community, with representation from UCL Library Service, Advanced Information Systems Centre, Platform Technologies, UCL Centre for Health Informatics and Multi Professional Education, UCL Research & Innovations, MRC Head Office, UK Birth Cohort Study, MRC Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health and MRC Unit of Lifelong Health and Ageing.

The meeting began with an examination of the proposed Terms of Reference for the Group (see below) which were approved.

Mission

To encourage and aid the development of secure research data management, including tools and techniques for planning and execution, within the Faculty of Population Health Sciences at UCL and to share best practice with population health scientists throughout the UK.

Terms of Reference

To identify appropriate deliverables and metrics of success in the following domains:

1. awareness of the importance of information security and data management planning in the Faculty and beyond;
2. community involvement via consultation and engagement across appropriate UCL and UK population health constituencies;
3. sharing of best practice across population health science research community.

There followed a series of short presentations that were designed to set the scene for the group and provide background to the DMP-SS project. I started by giving an overview of the local epiLab service that we have established at the MRC Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health over the past 3 years. I described how the implementation of a secure virtual desktop environment has inevitably required that we develop ways of better describing users data management requirements and is of particular concern when cloud services are being considered.

Martin Donnelly, the project manager of DMPOnline, continued with a description of the service and outlined the ongoing development strategy, including the refinement and validation of mappings to funders requirements, the provision of flexible templates to accommodate funder and institutional requirements and the possible deployment of DMPOnline as a secure, independently hosted JANET service.

Mike Sievwright, the project manager of the UCL Identifiable Data Handling Project at UCL, outlined the approach that his group has taken in developing the strategy for management of identifiable research data at the UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences. A clear message from his work has been the need to significant cultural change through education and researcher engagement.

Discussion points:

1) Storage of Data Management Plans outside host institution.

the question was posed of whether there were any practical concerns held by the group in respect of the possibility of DMPs being stored on DMPOnline, at Edinburgh University.

MD expressed the view that no intellectual property should reside within a data management plan, however TC pointed out that institutions may want to capture a more detailed plan, including some local information that is not deemed relevant by the DCC. Furthermore, reduction in the need for multiple entry of information would be crucially important for uptake by researchers. JP said that there was value in having local templates that researchers could complete “off-line” rather than being forced to log into a website. PD confirmed that MRC’s view of data management plans is that they should be kept simple and typically take the form of a short Word document.

MD pointed out that discussions are on-going about the possibility of a JANET hosting service being created to host an instance of DMPOnline.

2) Data Management Planning at UCL

PD expressed his strong support for the engagement of UCL widely in the adoption of formal processes for the development of data management plans. The view of the group is that we need to achieve a firm academic basis for data curation, handling and information security generally. It was proposed that the project team set up a workshop to which interested stakeholders at UCL would be invited to discuss the challenges in DMP development at an institutional level – to include representation from the LSHTM. There may be an opportunity to link with Paul Ayris on the UCL Library Research Data strategy.

MD pointed out that the DCC has resource specifically to assist institutions with the development of DMPs and he would be happy to support this initiative.

3) Training and user engagement

Training and community engagement were identified across the group as critically important requirements for success and adequate resource should be identified to support this activity.

JANET’s Computer Security Incident Response Team’s (CSIRT) annual conference took place in the Royal Society of Medicine on 10th November 2011. I had already been asked to present the outcomes of our TSB funded SHARE project which involved the use of a secure private cloud to host epidemiology research computing services. This was of particular interest to the delegates since it outlines the practical issues that we faced with contracts and formal certification to ISO-27001 of the working environment. When I was writing the talk I realised that the DMP-SS project represented an important component of the whole picture and illustrates the iterative nature of our information security approach. The whole slide deck is available here but the key message that I was looking to make is best summed up below.

Illustration of the journey in the development of an ISMS showing the need for data management plans as a core component of domain knowledge

Essentially, the use of data management plans in the development and ongoing curation of an information security management system is one of the core issues being explored by this project and I was interested to see what the views of delegates to this meeting would be to this proposal. I think its fair to say that there was broad agreement that this approach seems to address one of the critical challenges in establishing good information security within an academic research environment. The delegates at the meeting had confidence that they understood the technical issues relating to security but acknowledged that the management issues we perhaps the most profound and enigmatic.

This was indeed the conclusion of the first speaker, Richard Walton, who spoke eloquently on his long career advising government agencies on information security. He clearly outlines the importance of management issues, suggesting that most of the breaches in information security should be from the inside of an organisation.

A surprising outcome from this presentation was the chance meeting with UCL’s Deputy Head of Information Security, Luci Thomas. We had an opportunity to discuss the SHARE and DMP-SS projects in more detail and agreed to work closely with her team to ensure that the ISMS that we develop within the DMP-SS project can be applied across the broader UCL context.