Join the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship and the UCL eResearch Domain to explore opening data and code.

Date: Thursday 28th October
Time: 4-5pm
Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/opening-data-code-who-is-your-audience-tickets-172935283087?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=escb

To achieve the potential impact of a particular research project in academia or in the wider world, research outputs need to be managed, shared and used effectively.

Open Research enables replicable tools to be accessible to a wide audience of users. The session will showcase three projects and discuss the potentials of reuse of data and software and how to adapt to different types of user.

Join our speakers and panel discussion to:

• understand the potential of sharing your data and software
• learn about how projects share their software and data with different audiences and how they tailored their open data & code to different audiences appreciate the needs of different types of user (e.g. industry based, policy maker, citizen scientists)

Please register online.

The Sorbonne Declaration on Data Rights

27 January 2020 saw a number of global university networks assemble in Paris under the chairmanship of LERU (League of European Research Universities). The international Research Data Rights Summit was dedicated to a discussion of Open Data and national/regional legislative frameworks to support research data management, research data being the building blocks on which publications (such as journal articles) can be based. The meeting was called under the aegis of the Sorbonne University, the University of Amsterdam and UCL (University College London).

The Sorbonne Declaration is signed

Following intensive discussion, 8 global university networks signed the Sorbonne Declaration on research data management and research data rights. These networks are: the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Coordination of French Research-Intensive Universities (CURIF), the German U15, the Group of Eight (Go8) Australia, the League of European Research Universities (LERU), RU11 Japan, the Russell Group (UK), and the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities. This Data Summit was unprecedented in its scale, with networks representing more than 160 of the main research-intensive universities in the world actively involved.

Research data is the new currency in the age of Open Science/Scholarship. This is an essential issue for the quality and transparency of research. It is also a crucial economic issue: funded largely by public money, research data represents tens of billions of euros worldwide. The objective is therefore to make these data accessible in order to accelerate scientific discoveries and economic development. For example, in Europe, according to a recent report produced by the European Commission, sharing and better managing research data would save 10.2 billion euros per year in Europe, with an additional potential of 16 billion euros of added value by the innovation generated. With the current global concern over the coronavirus, the sharing of research data can only help lead us faster to finding effective treatments. The Sorbonne Declaration is therefore set against the background of the growing importance of research data as a key scholarly output which can benefit society and address the global challenges which face humankind.

Zamansky Tower, Sorbonne University

The Sorbonne Declaration acknowledges a number of principles which underpin research activity in the age of Open Science/Scholarship, such as: research data should be openly shared and re-used as much as possible and it is the academic community which can identify the complex conditions for such re-use.

The university networks commit to a number of actions, such as: research data should be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable); and changing reward schema to acknowledge FAIRness and Openness.

The Declaration calls on the global research community to build the necessary environment to encourage data sharing and makes a number of requests of funding agencies, such as to consider the full costs of research data management as eligible costs for funding; and of national jurisdictions, to ensure proper legislative frameworks to support openness and sharing, avoiding ‘lock in’ to commercial services.

Open Science/Scholarship is a force for good in the world, leading to better research methodologies and the global sharing of research publications. With the possibility to share research data, Open Science/Scholarship offers the potential to provide new routes for discovery and the creation of knowledge and understanding. This is what the Sorbonne Declaration aims to do – to create a scholarly landscape from which the whole of society can benefit.

Paul Ayris

Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services)

Open Science and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

On 15-17 January, UCL Library Services is hosting a distinguished visitor, Dr Nabi Hasan, Librarian and Head, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

IIT Delhi is one of UCL’s key emerging partners in India – just as the visitors from Witwatersrand in South Africa, who joined us in November 2019, are for that region of the world.  As London’s Global University, UCL is developing a number of key partnerships and the Library is honoured to be asked to support UCL’s work in these endeavours.

The theme of Dr Hasan’s visit is Open Science. Although the visit is only one day old, a number of Open Science themes have emerged where possibilities for sharing and development have been identified. The first is in the UCL Press OA publishing model, which is of great interest to the IIT Delhi. The second is the response which UCL has made to delivering services which support research data management in an Open Science environment. The third is in the role of the Library as an institutional Leader to deliver Open Science practice and policies across the University.

Nabi also gave a presentation on the world of librarianship in India and on the work of his own library service in the IIT Delhi. Like UCL, IIT Delhi is a family of libraries – 20 in total. At a glance, the Central Library offers the following facilities and services which are available to 10,275 students and 685 Faculty members:

• Reader Services Division
• Collection Development Division
• Technical Processing Division
• Electronic Resources Division
• Research Support Services and Outreach Program
• Library App
• Faculty Profiling System
• Exploring International Library Collaborations
• Exploring Semantic/AI/Query based services for Ask the Librarian, eNewsClippings, Faculty Publications, etc.
• Exploring Robotic-based Closed Access Services
• Interactive Website
• Marketing of Library Resources, Services and Products
• Text Book, Book Bank and Theses
• Humanities and Social Science (HUSS), etc.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable day. Many thanks to all colleagues in UCL Library Services, to UCL ISD and to RLUK (Research Libraries UK) who are contributing to the programme over the three days.

Paul Ayris

Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services)

The Research Data Management team and Research IT Services jointly run regular drop-in sessions.  These sessions are open to all UCL research staff and students. 

Someone from the Research Data Management team will be there to help you with:

• data management planning
• best practice in storing and sharing data
• complying with funder requirements

– at all stages of the research lifecycle.

If you’d like to come along to one of our drop-in sessions, please contact the RDM team at lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk with a summary of your research data query beforehand.

Representatives from all of the RITS service areas teams will also be on hand to answer questions or problems related the following areas:

• research programming
• workflow automation
• finding tools and services for your research programmes
• high performance computing
• handling large datasets
• handling personal and GDPR special category data
• data storage

For RITS queries, there’s no need to book, but the RITS team can make sure there’ll be someone there to help with your problem if you email rits@ucl.ac.uk, ideally two days before the session.

Researchers are encouraged to attend however small their query. The sessions will also be a good opportunity to discuss research funder requirements, find out about services available at UCL and to get support with particular issues you are having.

Upcoming sessions

Updated from the original post by Myriam Fellous-Sigrist, dated 11 December 2018

On Monday (3^rd of September), I attended the Harnessing FAIR Data conference held at Queen Mary in conjunction with UCL and the Science and Engineering South consortium. The event launched with an opening talk from Prof. Pam Thomas – the Pro Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Warwick. Prof. Thomas spoke of her involvement in leading a task force on Open Research Data which will eventually culminate in a final report in early 2018. Whilst the details of the report are yet to be finalised, the talk raised pertinent questions about what will happen to the increasing amounts of openly available research data that the UK universities seek to generate. As one audience member pointed out, there is still a need for specialist software to process this data otherwise it will remain unusable to other researchers in the future. Questions are currently abound as to whether researchers’ data will form part of the REF submission but for the meantime, it will remain more of a gold standard. David Hartland followed by giving an overview of the Jisc funded FAIR data report and confirmed what many in the audience already largely suspected – the difficulties of what adherence to FAIR data principles means in practice.

Another lively talk was given by Dr. Peter Murray-Rust who provided a rallying cry to all researchers to get behind their readers. The fact remains that a vast amount of research can only be accessed via a pay wall. Murray-Rust made the point that closed access data kills especially in countries which do not readily have access to the latest scientific research. Plus, researchers face further problems trying to extract data from articles which continue to be blocked by publishers as a result of access restrictions. Other talks centred more on the individual projects that researchers ranging from doctoral to early career and established are undertaking. Prof. Paul Longley from UCL’s Consumer Data Research Centre provided another interesting discussion about big data analytics. Just think about how much data companies take from our loyalty cards as a way to understand our shopping habits and movements. But how can this be harnessed for the social good? Well, according to Prof. Longley, we might want to use this data to look at people’s mobility around the country. This was later followed by a wide range of researcher lightning talks about their uses of open data. Some disciplines like biology pose more difficulties than others, as Dr. Yannick Wurm from Queen Mary argued, because they are still considered a young data science.

The conference ended with a panel discussion chaired by Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust. The panel was interspersed by anecdotes from Dr. Paul Ayris and Prof. Henry Rzepa about their personal experiences of sharing data. Dr. Ayris felt very much that historians continue to be resistant to sharing data. Prof. Henry Rzepa also spoke of his work as a research chemist and how his research later become subject to scrutiny only to discover that there were two ways his results could be interpreted.

All in all, the conference provided enough food for thought about the opportunities and difficulties that lie ahead for making use of researchers’ data in both a FAIR and open way.

I recently visited Utrecht University as part of an Erasmus Exchange exploring Open Science. The exchange was attended by staff working in libraries across Europe including Croatia, Finland, Malta, Austria, France and Latvia.  The exchange focused on Open Science support being delivered by Utrecht University as part of a national plan for open science.

Open Science in the Netherlands 

The programme was introduced in the context of ambitious plans in the Netherlands to pursue Open Science launched in a ‘National Plan open Science‘ launched in February 2017.

This plan includes focuses on three key areas;

1. open access to publications which includes the ambitious aim ‘that publicly-funded scientific publications must be accessible to all by 2020’
2. Making research data optimally available for reuse
3. Recognition and rewards for researchers.

Open Science at Utrecht University

Utrecht University has developed local plans with the library playing a key role in supporting open science. The library spent time meeting with researchers to discuss how open science could be implemented within the university. This ensured researchers could outline their concerns and their own visions of open science. The chair of the project to implement the project is a researcher and will be supported by library colleagues. The library believed that this strategy of in-depth engagement which included meeting with 45 researchers/groups ensured that there was true buy-in from the research community when the project was launched.

The library has taken a distributed approach to work on Open Science with staff across the library taking ownership of particular areas of open science support. This approach has allowed the library to have a bigger impact than could be achieved by limiting open science support to one team and has made a broader range of support services possible.

Utrecht University’s city centre Library

Areas of Open Science support

The schedule during the week included sessions on a range of topics:

Open access

This session introduced the work being done within the university and in particular focused on the coordinated work being carried out by Dutch universities to negotiate national deals with publishers for Hybrid Journals. These deals mean that researchers are able to publish without paying APCs themselves. Some publishers have helped this process by introducing workflows that make it easy for researchers to understand that they do not need to pay for an APC whilst also reducing the workload for the library in processing APCs.

The library also funds APCs for full Open Access journals but has set a maximum APC of a 100 Euros. This approach  – similar to that of other funding bodies including the Austrian Science Foundation – is intended to positively impact the market for APCs and push down the price. This type of policy was the topic of my Master’s dissertation so it was nice to revisit the topic and see how these approaches are currently being pursued by university libraries.

Research Data Management support 

Utrecht University has a policy on Research Data similar to that of UCL. Alongside helping develop and advocate for this policy the library provides training and support across the research data lifecycle including Data Management Planning and the publication of Research Data through various repositories.  A recent project by the library to build a pool of Data Managers based in the library but working on projects within the university was a particularly interesting approach to delivering practical support to projects in a sustainable way. This allows smaller projects who would struggle to hire a data manager themselves to get access to support as part of a funded project and also ensures that knowledge about systems, processes and policies are not lost at the end of a project when temporary staff leave.

Data Storage infrastructure at University of Utrecht and Research IT services

Utrecht University has also worked to develop IT Services to support research. This is still a relatively new area of support but has already resulted in some impressive projects. This includes YODA a platform that allows researchers to store, manage and share data on one platform. It leverages iRODS a data management technology which allows researchers or data managers to set rules for how data will be managed. YODA includes options to take snapshots to be archived at particular points in the project, options to share data with collaborators with a range of access permissions and to publish metadata or the full data through a repository. A major advantage of the platform is that it is also suitable for holding sensitive data. This means researchers don’t need to engage with different systems when they are working on projects that contain sensitive data and they can also easily publish metadata only records of projects to allow other researchers to request access to this data.

Digital Humanities support, Open Education Repository and other experiments by the library

The library is also experimenting in a number of other areas related to open science. This includes providing support for digital humanities projects, particularly by providing legal advice for text mining projects and facilitating access to materials. The library is currently launching an open education repository to support the dissemination of potentially reusable teaching materials. Utrecht University Library is also in the process of becoming an early example of a library without a catalogue. Instead, they have moved their collections to WorldCat this approach was taken in recognition of the fact that most researchers and students won’t necessarily begin searching for information through a university library catalogue.

Lessons learned

Attending this Erasmus Staff Exchange was a valuable learning experience, particularly in helping me think about how to link the Research Data Management support within the library to open science. Some of the lessons picked up on the exchange will feed into a course I run on open science and open notebooks.  The approach of developing a programme for a group of visitors meant that experiences of supporting open science could be exchanged between participants and it was particularly interesting to learn about how open science was being approached across different insitutions accross Europe. I hope that the Erasmus Exchange will continue to be available to people based in UK universities in the future and would encourage anyone interested to apply to the scheme. If you have questions about how it works I would be happy to answer them.

This week is the 3rd international Love Data Week. ‘Similar to Open Access Week, the purpose of the Love Data Week (LDW) event is to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services.’ Several Research Data Management teams from London universities have joined forces to run a series of data related events.

Most events are open to all UCL research staff and research students and library staff are also welcome to attend. During the Love Data Week we will also be publishing a number of data case studies on UCL’s Research Data Management Blog.

You can find an overview of the events below;

• Get Ready for GDPR: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 1pm
• What’s my Research Data?: Monday, 2pm
• UCL Research IT & Data Management drop-in: Tuesday, 10am
• Get Your Data In Shape (Organizing and Documenting): Tuesday, 2pm
• Working With Audio Visual Data: Wednesday, 11am
• Consumer Data Research Centre drop-in: Wednesday, 11am-2pm
• Working With Personal Data: Wednesday, 2pm
• Making the Most of Your Research Data: Thursday, 11am
• UCL Introduction to Digital Scholarship and Open Research: Thursday, 1.30pm
• Data Management Planning: Thursday, 3pm
• Introduction to UK Data Service: Friday, 2-3.3opm

A full listing of events is available to share.

For any UCL-specific questions, please contact the UCL Research Data Support officers at lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk.

Text Mining: the role for libraries?

Time: 14:00 – 16:30

Date: 23/11/2017

Location: Room 417, DMS Watson Science Library

Text mining – also known as Text Data Mining, Text analytics and Distant Reading – refers to a broad range of processes for extracting information from text. This includes visualization of a single text, finding patterns in large corpora and topic modelling.

Text Mining presents exciting opportunities for researchers across all disciplines.  The expanding volume of literature, the growing interdisciplinary nature of research and the ever-decreasing cost of computing power makes text mining an increasingly powerful tool for researchers. However, despite the potential benefits, the use of text mining in research is still limited.

There are a number of reasons for this; legal barriers, difficulty accessing materials and a lack of knowledge on potential tools and techniques are some of the major ones. Is there a role for libraries to play in overcoming these barriers?

The Research Data Management team have been working with colleagues from the library and Research IT services on a session exploring the potential role libraries could play in supporting Text Mining.

The session will provide:

– an introduction to (potential) uses of text mining in research (Daniel van Strien)

– an outline of some of the legal issues surrounding text mining (Chris Holland Copyright Support Officer at UCL)

– examples of some of the research being done using text mining approaches by UCL researchers in collaboration with Software Developers from Research IT services (Tom Couch, RITs and Raquel Alegre, Research Software Development Group)

The session will allow time for discussion around the potential role of libraries in supporting text mining and present some options for further activities.

If you would like to attend please send an email to d.strien@ucl.ac.uk

The Research Data Management (RDM) team recently ran two training sessions on RDM aimed at library staff. The first of these sessions was aimed at subject liaison librarians. The second was organised by Angela Young as part of the series the Summer School and was primarily aimed at library staff working in biomedical libraries.

Both sessions aimed to provide an introduction (or reminder) of the aims behind RDM, the services available at UCL to support researchers and to discuss how library staff can support RDM. As part of our ongoing work to develop the services we offer to support researchers with RDM, we are trying to increase the amount of subject specific resources and guidance available. Different disciplines can have very different types of data, different approaches to working with data or a perception that they don’t work with data. Working with colleagues in the library who support researchers across the disciples represented at UCL should help us develop better support for researches.

As part of both of the sessions, we had a number of different exercises. One of the exercises involved mapping out the interactions library staff and services have with researchers at different stages of the research lifecycle. We asked participants to work in groups to discuss whether the lifecycles accurately reflected the research process and decide on their preferred model. We then asked participants to annotate their chosen lifecycle with points where they may have interactions with researchers.

One of the challenges for the RDM team is trying to engage researchers earlier in their research process so we can help advocate for good practices in storing and collecting data which in turn makes data sharing easier at the end of a project. Mapping out the lifecycles with colleagues from the library gave us useful insights into where potential opportunities may be available for RDM advocacy. During the sessions, we also discussed how existing activities carried out by library staff (training, open access advocacy, signposting, research support…) and the existing skills of library staff can complement RDM advocacy.

We are planning to collate the research lifecycles produced during the sessions and turn it into a resource for us to use when planning advocacy. If you are interested in contributing to developing a lifecycle model with us send an email to lib-academicsupport@ucl.ac.uk.

LEARN End of Project Conference

5 May saw the final Conference in the 2-year EU-funded LEARN project on research data management (RDM), which has been led by UCL. This attracted 128 registrations in Senate House from 21 countries, with 95 institutions represented.

The day opened with a keynote presentation by Professor Kurt Deketelaere (Secretary General of LERU, the League of European Research Universities). Kurt gave a challenging presentation on the need for universities to get serious about RDM. He noted the leadership role that Europe is playing in delivering RDM solutions. Further keynote addresses in the Programme from Spain and Finland amplified the theme from the point of view of research-intensive universities and infrastructure suppliers. Panel sessions with guest members answered questions from the audience on RDM and debated with each other the validity of current approaches and views.

After lunch, the Conference broke into 4 parallel Tutorials, for which UCL led 2. I gave a tutorial on how to use the 200-page LEARN Toolkit of 23 Best Practice Case Studies. June Hedges, Myriam Fellous-Sigrist and Daniel Van Strien also gave a tutorial on engaging early career researchers in RDM issues.

The final keynote was delivered by Dr Claudio Gutierrez of the University of Chile, illustrating with an apple and two books  that research data has become the new currency of the research environment.

The Conference marked the end of the LEARN project, which officially finishes at the close of the month. Twitter postings underline how valuable attenders found the event. CODATA and EUDAT have commended the Toolkit of Best Practice Case Studies. In one of the video podcasts from the day, a North American visitor commented that (as a result of his attendance) he felt Europe was more advanced than the USA in tackling RDM issues. This, and other podcasts, will be available on the LEARN website (along with videos of all the plenary sessions). The podcasts can currently be seen via Twitter and are discoverable under the hashtag #learnldn.

The LEARN partners have enjoyed working together so much over the last 2 years that we are already planning a LEARN II – this time focussed on the whole area of Open Science.

Paul Ayris

Pro-Vice-Provost