New year, new team members!

The Research Data Support team has had some noteworthy changes in the last few months.

Pauline WardLongtime staff member Pauline Ward has embraced a new management role as Data Repository Operations Officer, where she will work with two Research Data Support Assistants, myself as service owner, and the Digital Library software engineers. The Digital Library hosts our open and restricted access repositories, DataShare and DataVault – to ensure smooth operations of these data archiving solutions into the future. The two new Research Data Support Assistants are Maeve McCann and Stefano Bordoni, who will be supporting users with our repositories Edinburgh DataShare and DataVault, among other activities with the team (time will tell!).

Maeve has previously worked for the IT team at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Maeve McCannPhilosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences (PPLS), where she was responsible for the development and management of the student and volunteer research databases.  She led the implementation of the Volunteer Panel – a bespoke system for researchers and participants to post and sign up for studies and Maeve also provided technical support for the PPLS Ethics system.

Prior to working for the university, Maeve has held roles with several children’s charities and management consultancy firms.  In her free time, Maeve enjoys mountain biking, skiing and travel.

Stefano Bordoni has recently completed a Doctorate in Archaeology at The University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on historic masonry techniques and building materials in Umbria (Italy). During this experience, he took advantage of IT tools in exploring the informative potential stored in medieval and early modern constructions. In his years in academia, he has taken part in several archaeological projects and excavations. Among them, he established and supervised the Pietrarossa Archaeological Excavation (University of Perugia) and managed the GIS platform for the Water in Istanbul Project (British Institute at Ankara & partners).

Stefano BordoniPrior to his current role, he has worked within the University of Edinburgh as a Tutor in the School of History, Classics & Archaeology, a CDCS Training Fellow (at the Centre for Data, Culture & Society), and EdHelp Information and Support Assistant, in Information Services. In his free time, he loves cooking traditional Umbrian food, foraging wild mushrooms and cycling.

Before the end of the year we bid goodbye to colleagues Dr Bob Sanders, now taking up a lead training role with the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR) based in the School of Geosciences here, and Yue Gu, Research Data Steward, a PhD candidate in Econometrics who has taken an analyst role at Natwest.

Good luck to everyone in their new roles!

Robin Rice
Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support

Edinburgh Open Research Conference Proceedings

EOR logoOne of the ambitions for the EOR conference held in March, 2022, when we first started planning it was to make it as open and accessible as possible. To achieve this we made the whole event hybrid so that plenary talks, posters, and workshops were all accessible on the day to both in person and remote attendees. While this generally worked very well for both remote and in-person attendees, we also wanted to make it available to people who couldn’t attend on the day – so we recorded everything, and the recordings of the talks and posters can now be openly accessed through our Edinburgh Open Research journal at http://journals.ed.ac.uk/eor.

Kerry Miller
Research Data Support Officer & Open Research Co-Ordinator
Library Research Support

First Edinburgh Open Research Conference: March 27th 2022

On this day in history, Kerry Miller (Library Research Support) and Laura Klinkhamer (Edinburgh Open Research Initiative and ReproducibiliTea) delivered a packed programme of speakers, workshops, and poster presentations.

Attendees online and in person were treated to a fine and varied selection of talks. To begin with, topics ranged from Gavin McLachlan’s overview of current national and international political contexts and Dominic Tate’s review of the University’s Open Research Roadmap, to the latest in open access publishing from Rebecca Wojturska and Dominique Walker, FAIR principles from Susanna-Assunta Sansone, and Eugenia Rodrigues on inclusivity and Citizen Science.

Other speakers – Malcolm Macleod, Jane Hillston, Alan Cambell, and Stephen Curry – focused on research culture and integrity. Notably, they reminded us that open practices aren’t just essential for replication and verification, they might also help in dealing with all kinds of bad behaviour: bullying, harassment, perhaps even research misconduct. As one would expect, the need to incentivise and reward openness was also a hot topic. Not a bad idea, especially if the aim is to change people’s behaviour for the better.

The session on training and education was particularly interesting, especially the middle two presentations, both of which focused on openness and pedagogic practice. First, Madeleine Pownall presented a synthesis of evidence relating to impact on student outcomes. Her findings suggest that exposure to open practices can improve scientific literacy, critical thinking, and core competencies, including understanding statistics and research methods.

Nicely complementing Madeleine’s study, Emma MacKenzie and Felicity Anderson gave us the benefit of hands-on experience. Speaking from either side of the student-supervisor relation, they described their use of open source tools, materials, and mind-sets in student projects. Here, too, we saw the development of core competencies, this time including the documentation, discussion, and resolution of errors.

The lessons from all three presenters are clear enough: make the resources of scholarly research accessible and students will engage with them enthusiastically, intelligently, and with self-awareness. Just imagine what might be achieved should such attitudes ever escape the classroom and reach the wider world.

There were also poster sessions, culminating in first prize for Livia Scorza’s ‘Not going to waste – preserving Scotland’s COVID-19 waste water data,’ and there were workshops covering everything from public engagement to Open Research and AI.

The event concluded with a well-deserved show of appreciation for our organisers, Kerry and Laura. Meanwhile, everyone agreed that the day had been a lot of fun and educationally valuable. To see the ties between Open Research, Integrity, and Research Culture being drawn ever closer was both fascinating and encouraging; likewise, the enthusiasm for embedding openness in the student experience.

Best of all, however, it was good to be there in person, especially after the last two years. Speaking to real people and seeing others speak in all three available dimensions was really a very pleasant reminder of what it’s like to be a human being.

Simon Smith
Research Data Support Service

Photographs by Eugen Stoica: ES CC-BY 4.0

DataShare awarded CoreTrustSeal trustworthy repository status

CoreTrustSeal has recognised Edinburgh DataShare as a trustworthy repository.

What does this mean for our depositors? It means you can rest assured that we look after your data very carefully, in line with stringent internationally-recognised standards. We have significant resources in place to ensure your dataset remains available to the academic community and the general public at all times. We also have digital preservation expertise and well-planned processes in place, to protect your data from long-term threats. The integrity and reusability of your data are a priority for the Research Data Service.

Book to attend our practical “Archiving your Research Data” course

The certification involves an in-depth evaluation of the resilience of the repository, looking at procedures, infrastructure, staffing, discoverability, digital preservation, metadata standards and disaster recovery. This rigorous process took the team over a year to complete, and prompted a good deal of reflection on the robustness of our repository. We compiled responses to sixteen requirements, a task which I co-ordinated. The finished application contained over ten thousand words, and included important contributions from colleagues in the Digital Library team and from the university Digital Archivist Sara Thomson.

Our CoreTrustSeal application in full   

The CTS is a prestigious accreditation, held by many national organisations such as the National Library of Scotland, the UK’s Centre for Environmental Data Analysis and UniProt. Ours is the first institutional research data repository in the UK to receive the CoreTrustSeal (the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre has the CTS but, in contrast to DataShare, is a disciplinary repository which archives data from the international research community).

DataShare is a trustworthy repository, where you as a researcher (staff or student) at the University of Edinburgh can archive your research data free of charge. Bring us your dataset – up to 100 GB(!) – and we will look after it well, to maximise its discoverability and its potential for reuse, both in the immediate term and long beyond the lifetime of your research project.

Edinburgh DataShare

All CTS certified repositories

circular logo bearing a tick mark and the words 'Core Trust Seal'

The Research Data Support team has earned the right to display this CTS logo on the DataShare homepage

Pauline Ward
Research Data Support Assistant
Library & University Collections