Opening UCL: roadmap for a new higher education landscape

By t.johnson, on 12 April 2019

Perspectives for Open Education at UCL

The UCL Open Education project recently hosted Opening UCL, a symposium on Open Education to explore the current landscape in open education practice in higher education. Some highlights include:

• Innovative Open Educational Resources (OERs):  MOOCs (such as 23 Things) and interactive classroom surveys were showcased by Edinburgh and the Open University
• The Open Knowledge Foundation explained how open education is a global social and ethical imperative, how it can enrich research, and How to make data open
• Radiopaedia illustrates how online textbooks have the edge over paper versions, and can be open to all, easy to update and free for less wealthy countries
• UCL Arts and Sciences undergraduates and their tutor described how cross-discipline research honed research and meta skills, with a Wikibooks entry as the output.

UCL Connected Curriculum (Dilly Fung)

OER were shown to foster learning, digital literacy, creativity, student engagement, and collaboration across disciplines.

UCL Library Services and Digital Education, co-hosts, introduced the UCL Roadmap for Open Education.  By 2021, open education will be embedded within the UCL community via supporting policies, infrastructure, and a connected curriculum of research-based teaching frameworks and student-generated research, to include:

• UCL Open: Environment, the new megajournal
• an open education resources repository
• UCL Press, the UK’s first open access university press, nearing 2 million downloads

Also read a full account of Opening UCL by Susan Koseoglu, Goldsmiths College.

Further Reading

• A Connected Curriculum, Dilly Fung, UCL Press
• The Battle for Open, Martin Weller, the Open University
• News article: UCL Open Access Megajournal Starts Taking Submissions

Digital preservation – not forgetting the software

By t.johnson, on 11 April 2019

Why preserve software?

Digital preservation tends to focus on making data or digital objects open, FAIR and in the correct format for future use. But what about the software applications needed to store, retrieve and manipulate these data? Operating systems, hardware, licences and web hosting organisations all change over time.  So, good research requires us to understand and preserve the software supporting our research data.

Research Integrity & Research Support course for PhD students- 27/03

By ucylmfe, on 13 March 2019

Photo by A.Wilkinson / CC BY

This regular training course introduces PhD students to research support available during the course of their studies. It is relevant for all PhD students, whatever the stage reached in their project and is applicable to all disciplines.

The half-day session focuses on Research Integrity, Research Data Management, Data Protection, Research Ethics, Open Access and Research IT. The course highlights good practices in these areas, explains the expectations of researchers and points them to relevant UCL support services.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 27/03/2019 (10am-1pm).

Booking information is available on the Doctoral Skills Development Programme website.

Digital skills courses & drop-ins – Term 2

By ucylmfe, on 5 February 2019

Students and staff can book new ISD courses to develop their skills in a wide range of topics, including bibliographic software, data analysis, databases, graphic applications, SharePoint, UNIX, R, spreadsheets and more.

Digital skills drop-ins are also available during term time, on Wednesdays.

Find more information about dates, locations and how to book the courses.

Love Data Week – free events: 11-15/02

By ucylmfe, on 5 February 2019

The 4th international Love Data Week is celebrated across the world between the 11 and 15/02/2019. Free events are taking place in London and the UK, including:

• The Birkbeck Library will run many sessions, open to all; topics include: Data Management Plans, NVivo, Open data and the GDPR. See full list of events and registration.
• The University of Liverpool Library and the LJMU Library also have several events on topics such as publishing and Gale Digital Scholar Lab. See full list

And as usual, the UK Data Service will be running free webinars about data management, finding and re-using data.

More events are taking place across the world, follow #lovedata19 for updates!

An Introduction to Text and Data Mining (TDM)  

By Ruth Wainman, on 14 January 2019

What is TDM?  

There are various definitions of Text and Data Mining (TDM) which cover both the technicalities and utilities of the practice. The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) usefully define TDM as: ‘The use of automated analytical techniques to analyse text and data for patterns, trends and other useful information’. Even within TDM, there are different definitions for both text and data mining. Text mining is more commonly seen as the computational process of discovering and extracting knowledge from unstructured data. Data mining, on the other hand, is the computational process of discovering and extracting knowledge from structured data. There has been a surge of interest in the use of TDM in academia across all disciplines ranging from the sciences to the humanities. Yet undertaking TDM has also entailed a whole host of legal and political issues, which have nearly threatened to hinder the practice. These issues have largely centred around copyright, intellectual property rights, licenses and download limits. 

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Research Integrity & Research Support course for PhD students- 30/01

By ucylmfe, on 18 December 2018

Photo by Epic Fireworks / CC BY

This regular training course introduces PhD students to research support available during the course of their studies. It is relevant for all PhD students, whatever the stage reached in their project and is applicable to all disciplines.

The half-day session focuses on Research Integrity, Research Data Management, Data Protection, Research Ethics, Open Access and Research IT. The course highlights good practices in these areas, explains the expectations of researchers and points them to relevant UCL support services.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 30/01/2019 (2-5pm).

Booking information is available on the Doctoral Skills Development Programme website.

UKRI Data Management Plans – Guidance for Future Leaders Fellowships (FLF) Applicants

By Ruth Wainman, on 18 December 2018

All applications for the UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowships require a data management plan. As the umbrella organisation of the UK’s major Research Councils, there is an expectation that all UKRI-funded research is ‘to be made available to the research community in a timely and responsible manner unless there are exceptional reasons why this cannot happen’. Researchers are also advised to consult the Research Council common principles on data policy as this provides the overarching framework for the individual UK research councils.

Researchers should use the template and guidance provided by the URKI. Plans can be up to three-page long but can be as little as a quarter of a page of A4 for less complex research projects. The data management plan must also demonstrate how ‘the applicant will meet, or already meets their responsibilities for research data quality, sharing and security’.

You can also find a template for the UKRI data management plan on DMP Online.

Further Resources

• UKRI Data Policy
• UKRI guidance on best practice in the management of research data

Oral History and Research Data Management

By Ruth Wainman, on 17 December 2018

Oral history can be a complicated beast when it comes to issues surrounding consent and ethics. Firstly, oral history is considered both a methodology and a field of study so this inevitably complicates things for researchers. As a field of study that has developed into its current form over the past fifty years, oral history has always concerned itself with giving a voice to the powerless, the marginalised and disenfranchised in society. As the field has developed over the years, so too have questions about the practice of oral history. After all, the very foundations of oral history relies on talking and listening to our subjects in order to record and preserve their memories for future generations. Yet, the academic pursuit of oral history has also raised numerous questions about the types of histories we record and the dynamics at play between researchers and their subjects. Indeed consent and ethics have always been a central concern of oral history. But when it comes to addressing these issues, oral historians need to strongly bear in mind that they are not only abiding by the professional standards of the field but also respecting the wholly collaborative nature of the interview. This guide will aim to provide an overview of the debates concerning consent in oral history and the issues it raises in research data management for researchers at UCL and beyond.

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How and where can students find data to re-use in a research project?

By Ruth Wainman, on 14 December 2018

This guide will aim to provide some useful advice for students on finding data to re-use during their research projects.

Data Resources Online

You may want to start by using UCL Explore to search for research studies based on secondary datasets. From there, you can consult the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) – a global repository of research data. It is also best kept in mind that different datasets require different permissions. If you are planning to use safeguarded or controlled access data, you will need to abide by additional conditions for accessing it. For example, this may include specific forms of citation, depositor permission to registration and authentication of the users of the data. There are plenty of online courses to help you navigate your way through the use of digital datasets. The University of Edinburgh run an online research data management training programme called MANTRA to help researchers learn how to manage their digital data. Furthermore, the UK Data Service provides a range of dataset and topic guides along with video tutorials on how to use data.

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