This time I am wrapping up the “International Data week” in Amsterdam, with the RDA 4th plenary (Reaping the fruits) as main event on 22-24 September 2014, and a range of satellite events on data were taking place in the same week. Just a (very) short impression!
Robert-Jan Smits kicked off the RDA meeting on Monday, where 520 attendants were present, by saying that only 10-30% of scientific articles can be reproduced. He urged the community to change their culture, and “treat your data as you treat your publications”.
The video by Neelie Kroes contained a few nice phrases, e.g. “Open science depends on open minds, and it can grow if we build it upon trust”.
Barend Mons held a very entertaining keynote on “Bringing Data to Broadway”, and introduced his FAIR play, to make research findable accessible, interoperable and reusable. Barend referred to his Data FAIRPORT. Do not say open all the time, perhaps call it fair science (I will give this suggestion at the end of the EC public consultation on Science 2.0!).
He showed us that data loss is real and significant, while data growth is staggering. We should realize how important data stewardship is: Educate, reward and keep data scientists. Professionalize data stewardship! 5% of research funding should go to data stewardship, it is really worth the money. So award the data steward, introduce a research object impact factor. And do not forget: “Knowledge is like laughter, it increases when shared”.
I could only attend this first day partially and then the third day. The RDA always holds a lot of parallel sessions, similar to the previous plenaries, where the interest groups and working groups talk about their challenges and progress.
The working group on workflows (part of the interest group Publishing Data) is in the midst of a workflow analysis, and they called for people to look at their Excel sheet, add new workflows or columns to address. A few examples of workflows were presented, Martina Stockhause opened a discussion on versions of data, where her suggestion was to have a high-level persistent identifier based on a collection, and then allow for changes within. We thought that her discussion would be addressed by the group on Dynamic Data (I cannot find the correct link to this group though!).
The closing panel on the third day gave an overview of the data situation in Brasil, Japan, Canada and the US. A few interesting, some slightly contradictory, observations:
- Should we refer to open data, or should we make a variety of how access can be arranged, realizing that private sector wants to exploit their data?
- Do not create artificial silos between research and industry.
- Data requires us to think in objects and connections, and we should work on improving services.
- Beware to be “going in the rathole of sustainability”. At the end it is of course far more expensive not to invest in infrastructure.
The coming six months (to the next plenary, in San Diego) the RDA will focus on adoption, to be using and eating the fruits, and they will be clustering the interest groups and working groups. I think that this is a sensible thing to do.
One of the remarks of the panel was that you need a national infrastructure to be able to participate in a global infrastructure, and that we should exchange best practices. I am proud that we managed in the Netherlands to have Research Data Netherlands, a coalition where now three data archives are sharing their experience and work together on realizing sustainable data archiving.
Talking about the processes is useful and necessary, but it was very rewarding to have presentations of six researchers during the Dutch Data Prize Award on 24 September.
On Thursday the RECODE Workshop had a meeting (and there were as said much much more interesting events this week). RECODE aims to have their final conference in Athens in January 2015. People at the workshop were invited to comment on the draft recommendations document of work package 5.
The group wants to produce evidence-based policy recommendations. They have identified four stakeholder groups, funders, research institutions, data managers and publishers (question was raised whether researchers should be added as stakeholder). To give a quick idea:
- Funders: Develop, implement, monitor and evaluate open access to research data. (During the panel later on, we discussed whether there was a funder that supports reusing data, that could be an addition to this short list.)
- Research institutions: Develop data management strategies, develop reward systems, develop training programs and support awareness-raising.
- Data managers: Develop mission and responsibilities, develop sustainable business models, achieve trust worthiness of repositories and content, and develop data management services.
- Publishers: Get policies for deposit of data and require data submissions in certified repositories.
Daniel Spichtinger (from European Commission, DG Research and Innovation) took part in the workshop and told us about the European Commission’s pilot for open access to research data. A few things were new for me, apparently the deposit in repositories is mandatory, but there is no requirement to have it in a trusted repository. The opt-outs for opening up your data have a wide range: there may be a conflict to protect results, a confidentiality issue or possible risk for national security, protection of personal data, and more. Another new thing for me was that apart from the selected areas (in the Excellence, Industrial Leadership or Societal Challenges programmes) all projects might go for a pilot on a voluntary basis. Further the data management plans are mandatory, but are not part of the project evaluation, they are required 6 months after project starts. At the end Daniel gave a nice quote: “This pilot gives you a chance to coshape policy on opening up research data.“ We also now know the take out so far (out of 3054 proposals): opt out is 24% in core areas, and 27% is the opt in, in other areas.
I am ending my post here, but our team, especially the product group Research Data Services, were of course in (almost) full-strength present, and apart from helping the main organisation DANS, sponsoring as 3TU.datacentrum (which we coordinate) the programme, we followed or contributed to Libraries for research data, Data publication, Long tail data and workshops on technique, training, policy and certification. A very busy week indeed!