To celebrate Love Data Week (10-14 February 2020), we are launching a series of videos titled “Four Golden Rules of Data Management”. These short videos look at examples of data management gone wrong which have hit the headlines and make recommendations for how these disasters could have been avoided.
In the first video, we look at the problems encountered by the Venice Time Machine project, and the importance of writing a data management plan.
Stay tuned for more videos in the series!
We’re so excited about our first Data Seminar, taking place next Thursday 14th November, 12.30-13.30.
We’ve got a great line-up from the Library, RES and FASS telling real-life stories of how data management has gone wrong and right. You’re welcome to bring your lunch along and we’ll provide some sweet treats too.
We’re pleased to announce the programme:
12.30: 4 Golden Rules of Data Management – Maxine Borton and Isabel Chadwick (Library)
Maxine and Isabel will use examples of data management gone wrong which have hit the headlines to deliver 4 golden rules to help you avoid data loss.
12.45 I am a Humanist, get me out of here! – Francesca Benatti (FASS)
Reflecting on her experiences as a PhD student, Francesca will give a personal take on how she’s learned to manage her research data effectively.
13.00 Technologies, Data Management and Specialist Archives – Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg (RES)
Muriel will talk about her experiences of depositing her audiovisual data in a specialist data archive, and give tips on how to avoid making the mistakes she unfortunately encountered.
13.15 Questions and discussion
The Library Research Support team are pleased to announce the launch of our new Data Champions programme, with the first of our Data Champions forums being held in the Library last week.
This forum was an opportunity for us to meet our Champions and for them to get to know each other, as well as to find out more about what the programme entails.
The Data Champions programme has been set up as a way of promoting OU Research Data Management (RDM) services and tools within faculties and to provide more discipline-specific data management advice and support.
As part of this programme, our Data Champions have been asked to contribute to the development and delivery of a data-focussed seminar series across the coming year; and planning for our first session has already begun in earnest.
Our 13 Data Champions offer representation across every faculty and bring with them a range of experiences of managing diverse data types, from highly sensitive interview data to archival materials and the re-use of third-party data. After hearing more about the programme (and a bit of themed cake!), our Champions made an enthusiastic start, sharing their data management experiences and producing a whole host of fantastic ideas to theme our future seminars around.
Keep your eyes open for updates on our first seminar!
Over the coming months we will be running a series of online bitesize training sessions on various aspects of research data management. These are open to all OU research staff and postgraduate researchers.
Please follow the links below for further information and joining instructions.
The latest instalment of my series on best practice in ORDO looks at sharing videos.
In late 2017, we were approached by Dr Erica Borgstrom from the faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies. Erica’s research focuses on death and dying, with a particular focus on end of life care. Over the course of the previous year she had been running a series of seminars on death and dying, all of which had been recorded and posted on an OU hosted website. Erica was concerned that the website would not be supported for much longer and that the videos were of high interest and needed to be made available to the public on another platform.This is where ORDO comes in – by putting the videos of the seminars on ORDO, they were given the security and credibility of being hosted on an OU platform, and we were able to guarantee that they would be maintained for a minimum of 10 years. Adding the videos to ORDO gave each one a DOI, enabling Erica and the seminar presenters to cite them at conferences or in papers and ensuring that they are recognised as valid research outputs. ORDO allows in-browser viewing of most audiovisual file types which means that the videos don’t need to be downloaded to be watched. We were also able to add metadata to the records to enable discoverability, and upload extra background documents alongside the videos to add context.
Finally, we grouped all the videos together into one collection, giving the entire seminar series a DOI and ensuring that they are seen as a complete body of work.
Seruset Borgstrom, Erica (2017): Open University Death and Dying Seminar Series. figshare. Collection. https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.rd.c.3825658.v2
Since the seminar series was uploaded to ORDO in January 2018, the videos have consistently featured in our top ten most viewed items. They have been viewed almost 7,500 times and downloaded 571 times.
A brief note from Erica:
I found working with ORDO and the library staff very helpful and exciting. Uploading and storing the videos in this way make them easy to share with a much wider audience and helps us fulfil our mission as an open, and accessible, university. The seminar speakers have also appreciated the professional platform to recognise their talk as a research output.
Did you know, on the first Thursday of every month between 14.00 and 15.00 we run an online drop-in for ORDO, our research data repository?
We’re here to help, whether you’re interested in using ORDO but not sure where to start, or you’ve been using it for a while and have questions about how to make the most of it.
To join, go to our Adobe Connect “Research Support” page and click on “join room” (and if you find the link takes you to the “DISS Home” page instead, click on “Resources” at the top and scroll down to “Research Support”).
Dates for the next few months:
Hope to see you there!
In the latest instalment of my series of blog posts discussing best practice in ORDO, I’m going to highlight some of the datasets underpinning PhD theses that have been deposited in ORDO.
Like OU research staff, postgraduate researchers are expected to deposit any research data underpinning their theses in a trusted data repository. There are numerous benefits to doing this, including:
Historically, research data or other digital materials underpinning theses have sometimes been put on a CD and enclosed with the hard copy of the thesis, lodged at the Library. However, from August 2019, the OU Library will only accept digital copies of theses which will be stored in ORO. This means that the old method of putting data onto CDs will no longer be possible.
Ideally, you should deposit your data or other materials in ORDO ahead of submission, so that you can include a Data Access Statement (which contains a DOI) within the body of your thesis.
Within the ORO record for your thesis, there is a field for “Related URLS” into which you can add your ORDO DOI as a “research dataset”. We also advise that you add the ORO URI to your ORDO record. We are looking into how we might be able to automate this process in the future.
You may have read in the news recently about a scandal concerning the doctoring of research data within a lab run by a top UK academic. Earlier this month UCL released details of the inquiries into misconduct, which were undertaken in 2014 and 2015. Of the 60 papers reviewed, the panels found evidence of misconduct in 15 of them. This included “cloning” whereby features were copy and pasted throughout an image, and some of the data fabrications were reportedly fundamental to the conclusions reached by the authors.
This news story struck me as a prime example of why data sharing is so important to improve research integrity. If the data underpinning the papers in question had been made publicly available in a trusted research data repository, it seems unlikely that misconduct of this level would have happened. Data sharing should encourage greater transparency of results – ensuring that researchers are less likely to falsify research findings or fabricate data, and if they do then this sort of misconduct could be spotted much more quickly. Would a culture of data sharing also have instilled a sense of responsibility on researchers to “do the right thing” rather than cutting corners?
Sharing research data can seem like an onerous task, however if a possible outcome of data sharing is greater research integrity, then it needs to be recognised as an important part of all researchers’ work.
Continuing my series on best practice in ORDO, this time I’m going to trumpet The Robert Minter Collection: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.rd.7258499.v1 which was deposited by Trevor Herbert in December 2018. According to the ORDO record:
This is a copy of the data underlying the website ‘The Robert Minter Collection: A Handlist of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Trumpet Repertory’ which contained a database of music collected by Robert L. Minter (1949-81).
Minter’s interest was in the collection of sources that contribute to our understanding of the trumpet at various points in its history before the twentieth century.
This is regarded as one of the world’s largest fully catalogued datasets about early trumpet repertoire.
The website in question was created in 2008 and is no longer active, however it had been archived by the Internet Archive, most recently in May 2017. In 2018, Trevor approached the Library for help archiving the data contained on the website because he was aware that although the Internet Archive had maintained much of the information, not all functionality and content had been preserved; most crucially the database itself is no longer searchable.
ORDO was deemed a good fit for creating an archive of the content of the website. It allows the deposit of any file type and enables in-browser visualisation of many of these so it is not always necessary to download documents in order to view them. By depositing the material in ORDO, Trevor also obtained a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) – a persistent, reliable link to the record which will be maintained even if the materials are no longer available for any reason. Any materials added to ORDO are guaranteed to be maintained for a minimum of ten years.
Within the record there are four files – an access database, a csv copy of the data, a zip file containing information about the collection, database and website and a list of files in the zip file. The description in the record makes it clear to any potential users what they are accessing and how they can be used. Since it was deposited in December, the collection has been viewed 139 times and downloaded 18 times. Now that deserves a fanfare!
