Author Archives: Robin Rice

About Robin Rice

Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support Library & University Collections

Digital Curation Interviews project with DCC

Posted on by
Reply

In this guest blog post, Clara Lines Diaz reports on last year’s Digital Curation Interviews with University of Edinburgh researchers, conducted by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) on behalf of Digital Research Services.

The project was initiated by staff in the Research Data Service to gain an overview of the research data and software management practices and challenges across the University through in-depth interviews with researchers. The DCC was selected as best placed to conduct the interviews, given its expertise on the subject matter and location at University of Edinburgh. The information was collected through semi-structured interviews during Spring 2023.

2 women talking at table


Image by WOCinTech Chat, Flickr

The motivation to collect this information was to help ensure that researchers are supported in their specific needs and to contribute to shaping the research data management (RDM) services. The choice of in-depth interviews as a method was also expected to help build deeper relationships between service providers and users.

For the semi-structured interviews we had some topic blocks as below, and some prepared questions within each of those blocks. This was used more as a check list for us and we gave the interviewees space to focus on or bring up anything they considered relevant.

Topic blocks:

  • A: Introduction: Research line, projects, collaborations
  • B: Data provenance, types and reuse
  • C: Data/Software management practices
  • D: Influences on data/software management practices
  • E: Data management challenges and sources of assistance

This type of interview works well for exploratory studies like this because it allows common and maybe unexpected patterns to emerge, but also has some caveats around comparability, as not all interviews cover exactly the same topics in the same level of detail. This means that in the results we were able to indicate, for example, how many people mentioned using a particular service, but we could not infer that the others don’t use it, just because they did not mention it.

To select the participants, we contacted research support staff in the three colleges and asked them to suggest participants or send the invitation around. It felt like there was a high interest to discuss these topics and make the challenges they encounter heard, especially among researchers in the College of Science and Engineering (CSE). The interviewees were all involved in data intensive research, with a mix of senior and early career researchers. The interviews were planned to last around 45 minutes but there was some variation in the duration.

From the 14 interviews, four were with staff from the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine (CMVM), eight with staff from CSE and two with staff from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS). The oversampling of CSE interviews was intended as the service team was particularly interested to hear about their practices, which are less well known to them.

Once we had all the interview notes, we extracted the comments and classified them by themes. This was the basis for the final project report, which included a selection of the themes and possible points for action for the Research Data Service and the Research Computing Service in five key areas:

  • Data sharing and reuse was common practice, but there were challenges and areas where further support would be beneficial.
  • Code sharing and collaborative development was widespread and growing, but support and services were perceived as being less mature than that provided for data.
  • External collaboration with university-hosted services could be challenging.
  • Awareness of FAIR and open science was variable.
  • There was an appetite for more training, both for students and staff.

Sharing and reuse had a special focus in the interviews and the first two points are connected to that. Most interviewees had a lot to say about challenges related to sharing and reusing data, especially those working with sensitive data. Some extra advice to help people with those challenges would help. Most interviewees also discussed storing and, in some cases, sharing their code. GitHub is in general preferred for that. Sharing code is in general considered very time consuming.

A briefing was given to the Digital Research Services in August, 2023 and the Research Data Support team was given the transcripts and full results to inform service development.

Clara Lines Diaz
Research Data Specialist
Digital Curation Centre

Large scale data transport service launched

Posted on by
1
Research Services, IT Infrastructure Division, are pleased to report that a project that allows researchers to transfer terabytes of data between the University of Edinburgh and external collaborators has been completed. The service uses a transport mechanism known as Globus to set up multiple connections between host and client to transfer data instead of relying on a single point-to-point connection. This results in very large data being transferred between sites in parallel, allowing faster transfer.

The service is integrated with the University’s research data platform, DataStore, allowing researchers to specify specific folders that can be used as “endpoints” to the transfer. Many users have already taken advantage of the service, but it is key to note that this will not improve data transfer speeds within the University itself, rather that bottlenecks in the wider Internet can be mitigated.

For more information, University of Edinburgh users may view the RSS Wiki.

Mike Wallis
IS ITI

Research Data Support team and DCC to host Skills4EOSC Fellow

Posted on by
Reply

University of Edinburgh has been chosen as one of 12 European institutions to host sponsored short secondments for data professionals in Open Science, as part of the Skills4EOSC Horizon Europe project. Whilst the Digital Curation Centre is a partner in the Skills4EOSC project (EOSC is the European Open Science Cloud), the Research Data Support team has been asked to be the primary host for the secondment, so the ‘fellow’ can participate and engage in the team’s day-to-day activities in supporting and training researchers in an academic setting.

Promotional image for Skills4EOSC fellowship

The project aims to develop common methodologies, activities and training resources to unify the current training landscape into a collaborative and reliable ecosystem and to provide dedicated community-specific support to leverage the potential of EOSC for open and data-intensive research. A number of enquiries have already been received and plans are currently underway with Library Research Support and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) to support the application of a European candidate to work with the team for a month in either April or July, 2024, with a deadline for the application of 31 October. More information is at https://www.skills4eosc.eu/participate/fellowship-programme.

 

Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2023: in summary

Posted on by
Reply

This is a guest post by the Library’s new Citizen Science Engagement Officer, Neil Coleman. All of the materials from the conference may be found on the Edinburgh Open Research Journal page.

After a wonderful three days of talks, workshops, and connecting, we can now call a close to a second successful open research conference. This year, the collaborative efforts of members from the Library Research Support teams (led by the wonderful Kerry Miller) and Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea (facilitated by the talented Emma Wilson) brought together speakers and attendees from all over – allowing connections to be forged with representatives across the UK (and further afield!).

On Monday we were treated to a number of intimate workshops, ranging from a targeted discussion on the future of our very own Edinburgh Diamond, to some practical guidance on how to support good Open Research practices in the Arts and Humanities. We even had the privilege of hosting Edinburgh’s very first ‘Research Café’, where Marshall Dozier, Ruth McQuillan and Lauren Hall Hew spoke about their experiences with Open Research, leading to a delightful discussion about the future of their work, and, importantly, how we might all improve. It was a great first step in this new initiative – a chance to have an in person chat about the trials and tribulations, but also the joy and excitement found in research.

Tuesday was ‘the big day’, with over a hundred in-person tickets sold, and more than 300 online attendees throughout the day. We began with a keynote from Kirsty Wallis (Head of Research Liaison at UCL). Her talk painted a detailed picture of some of the amazing work taking place. This included some stand out discussions of the progress they have been making with their support for citizen science and community connectedness with research; the Euston Voices/Euston Young Voices were really stand out case studies of the impact open research practices can have on the world beyond research.

A table of people in conversation with a fold out board and post-it notes on the left hand side.

In depth discussions taking place at the Monday Arts and Humanities workshop.

 

The remainder of the day allowed us to explore the themes of the conference in depth: looking for tangible solutions to global challenges. Our lunchtime keynotes, Daisy Selematsela and Lazarus G Matizirofa gave us a tour of the current status of Open Research in South Africa and the University of Pretoria in particular. Later, Will Cawthorn (our LERU Open Science Ambassador) spoke about the structures and initiatives that are helping to realise the potential of open science. Sandwiched between these fabulous lectures, a diversity of perspectives were offered in formats including lightning talks – from a community representative of a data-focussed environmental initiative (Pauline Ward, Data 4 Climate Action​) through to workflows from Xiaoli Chen (DataCite). Throughout, it was inspiring to see the levels of engagement – with a seemingly unending stream of questions and comments from the room and our online community following on from many of the talks, which continued for the in-person group in a drinks reception.

Photograph of William Cawthorne standing in front of an illustrated PowerPoint presentation.

Will Cawthorne presenting on research culture, with perhaps the most beautifully illustrated slide of the day!

The Wednesday closed the workshop sandwich. Gillian Currie and Charlotte Brady worked with attendees to develop ‘Bingo’ cards to promote good academic questioning at conferences. At the same time in the Pentland Suite, the focus was on the 9th Pillar: citizen science and participatory research. Lightning talks from project leads across the colleges were followed by in-depth discussions of the challenges faced by this unique but exciting collection of approaches.

The day and the conference drew to a close in the best possible way: engaging talk with pizza. Facilitated by a wonderful team of early career researchers, the final workshop focused on the relationship between PhD researchers and open research practices. As is typical in all cases of culture change – it has to happen at every level, and there is a risk of early career researchers being left behind. The future of research is open, and so ensuring that those at the start of their careers are well equipped is at the heart of all of the work we do.

With that in mind, then, we can now look forward, where the lessons learned, discussions had, and connections made will ground our work for the coming year. With two successful conferences behind us, this will surely become a tradition with Open Research 2024!

Photograph of Cristina Rusu presenting in front of a PowerPoint slide with an image of Charlie the cat.

While I would of course never admit to playing favourites, I will admit to being a huge fan of Charlie the cat from Loughborough University who was an unticketed virtual attendee.