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!

The Freedom of Information Act was created in 2000 to increase the transparency of the public sector and their activities. Under the Act, research data can be requested although copyright and IP rights to the data remain with the original researcher. When a request for information is made, there are normally 20 working days to respond. In the UK, most universities are defined as public authorities and are thus legally obliged to respond to FOI requests. There are, however, some key exemptions to the Act in the UK including:

1. Personal data about living individuals cannot be requested, unless it is about you.
2. Information that is accessible by other means.
3. Information intended for future publication.
4. Information that is subject to a confidentiality agreement.
5. Information whose release would prejudice legitimate commercial interests.
6. In Scotland, information that is part of a finite research programme for which there is a publication schedule and clear intent to publish.
7. If the public interest in withholding the information is greater than the public interest disclosing.

Source: Corti et al 2014

There have been a number of high profile cases in which FOI requests have been made against research data being collected by the universities. Data cannot be withheld indefinitely so you should always work under the presumption that if any information is not released the first time round, it can always be requested again. Researchers are therefore advised to detail the ways in which they plan to release their data in a data management plan in order to avoid any unanticipated FOI requests. It is therefore paramount that you plan for FOI and the implications of the Act when creating a data management plan. Writing a plan will also enable you to think more carefully through issues surrounding consent, sharing and ethics. Yet researchers should always remember that the FOI Act can often act as a useful means of data collection in its own right.

At UCL, further guidance on FOI can be found on the Research Integrity pages. If in doubt, researchers are also advised to get in contact with UCL’s specialist Legal Services team.

Further Information

• JISC guide to Freedom of Information and Research Data: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/research/documents/foiresearchdata.pdf

Research Data Management (RDM) is an increasingly important skill for researchers across all disciplines and career stages.

Research funders are increasingly introducing new requirements around Data Management as part of the application process. Often researchers will be asked to produce a Data Management Plan as part of a funding application or be required to share data at the end of a project.

This workshop will provide a practical overview of the major issues in RDM including how to meet funder requirements, how to effectively store data during your project, and making decisions about whether to share research data. As part of the workshop participants will begin to develop a datamanagement plan.

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• identify the main considerations in RDM for their project
• understand how to comply with funder policies
• make more informed decisions about effective data sharing
• produce an effective Data Management Plan

This session will take place on the 2nd of May, 14:00-16:00. Further details and booking available through Organisational Development

UCL Library Services is pleased to invite UCL staff to an afternoon of information and discussion about the UK Data Service (UKDS).

The UKDS is funded by the ESRC to meet the data needs of researchers, students and teachers in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Its collection includes major UK government-sponsored surveys, cross-national surveys, longitudinal studies, UK census data, international aggregate, business data, and qualitative data.

Participants will learn how to access these collections as well as how to deposit their own research data and sources in the UKDS repository, ReShare. During the drop-in session participants will be able to ask questions about data sharing, ESRC data management plans, consent procedures, data storage, encryption and more.

The event will take place in the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Common Ground.

See the programme and book your place.

This week is Love Data Week an international event ‘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.’ As part of Love Data Week, a number of free events are taking place across Bloomsbury. We will also be publishing short research data case studies as part of Love Data Week. These case studies cover a range of disciplines and types of data generated accross UCL.

The first case study looks at the British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus.

The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus

Research Area: Deafness Cognition and Language Research

Dr Kearsy Cormier is a Reader in Sign Language Linguistics at DCAL and affiliated with the UCL Linguistics research department. Dr Cormier is interested in the linguistic structure of sign languages, especially British Sign Language (BSL) and in visual aspects of language more generally

About the project

The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus is a collection of video clips showing Deaf people using BSL, together with background information about the signers and written descriptions of the signing.

Project funding

The video clips were collected as part of the original BSL Corpus Project, funded between 2008 and 2011 by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Research Data

The data are all video clips (and associated metadata) showing 249 deaf people from all over the UK using British Sign Language.

Storage

During the project the data was stored on a secure server within Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre at UCL.

Data sharing

The data are archived with UCL Digital Collections under the British Sign Language Corpus Project (CAVA Repository). There are two points of entry for working with the BSL Corpus data – one for researchers (via UCL CAVA) and the other that’s more user friendly for casual visitors (intended for the Deaf community). This approach offers an example of how data can be shared effectively for different audiences and make the research data more accessible to communities represented in the data.

 Student involvement

The data collected in the CAVA repository has been used extensively for teaching of Masters students.

Challenges

There were a number of challenges to the project. These include challenges related to data collection and the disclosure of names in the interview data by participants. As a result of some of these potential discoloures of names data had to be restricted to registered researchers who sign a user licence before accessing data.

Further information  

You can find further information about the project on the project website and an article on the project.