Category Archives: Roadmap progress

Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: Mar. & Apr. 2015

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9 EPSRC grant holders and researchers were interviewed as follow-up to the EPSRC Expectations Awareness Survey conducted in February.

A new leaflet detailing all systems in the RDM portfolio is being created, which will explain the Data Asset Register, and the use of PURE, in the context of all the systems available across the research lifecycle.

The PURE system now has a module that allows the datasets to be described. This fulfils EPSRC Research Data Expectations requiring datasets to be described and those descriptions made available online. Datasets described in PURE are shown as part of staff online profiles in Edinburgh Research Explorer alongside other research outputs.

The RDM Service Coordinator gave an invited presentation at the “Open access and research data management: Horizon 2020 and beyond” FOSTER Workshop, University College Cork, Eire (15 Apr. 2015) – https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/content/looking-after-your-data-rdm-edinburgh-institutional-approach

DCC and RDM programme staff to meet with key contacts in selected schools to discuss local support and draft guidance.

DataShare release 1.7.2 went live in April with a new default open licence – Creative Commons International Attribution, 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0) to replace the Open Data Commons Attribution licence.

Discussion is on-going between UNC-Chapel Hill, Data Library and colleagues in Web, Learning, and Teaching Division about collaborating on ‘MANTRA as a MOOC’ to be delivered next autumn.

ITI / Research Services are to investigate provision of a hosted GIT service for research software generated for research at the university.

RDM programme webpages in Polopoly are being checked for accuracy and compliance for their planned migration to Drupal.

All Schools in CHSS have now added links to the RDM Programme website and other RDM pages through their intranets. GeoSciences, Chemistry, Informatics and Mathematics in CSE have also added said links via their intranets.

Content has been finalised for the new ‘Working with personal and sensitive data’ RDM course.

Stuart Macdonald
RDM Service Coordinator

Edinburgh DataShare – new features for users and depositors

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I was asked recently on Twitter if our data library was still happily using DSpace for data – the topic of a 2009 presentation I gave at a DSpace User Group meeting. In responding (answer: yes!) I recalled that I’d intended to blog about some of the rich new features we’ve either adopted from the open source community or developed ourselves to deliver our data users and depositors a better service and fulfill deliverables in the University’s Research Data Management Roadmap.

Edinburgh DataShare was built as an output of the DISC-UK DataShare project, which explored pathways for academics to share their research data over the Internet at the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Southampton (2007-2009). The repository is based on DSpace software, the most popular open source repository system in use, globally.  Managed by the Data Library team within Information Services, it is now a key component in the UoE’s Research Data Programme, endorsed by its academic-led steering group.

An open access, institutional data repository, Edinburgh DataShare currently holds 246 datasets across collections in 17 out of 22 communities (schools) of the University and is listed in the Re3data Registry of Research Data Repositories and indexed by Thomson-Reuters’ Data Citation Index.

Last autumn, the university joined DataCite, an international standards body that assigns persistent identifiers in the form of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets. DOIs are now assigned to every item in the repository, and are included in the citation that appears on each landing page. This helps to ensure that even after the DataShare system no longer exists, as long as the data have a home, the DOI will be able to direct the user to the new location. Just as importantly, it helps data creators gain credit for their published data through proper data citation in textual publications, including their own journal articles that explain the results of their data analyses.

CaptureThe autumn release also streamlined our batch ingest process to assist depositors with large and voluminous data files by getting around the web upload front-end. Currently we are able to accept files up to 10 GB in size but we are being challenged to allow ever greater file sizes.

Making the most of metadata

Discover panel screenshot

Example from Geosciences community

Every landing page (home, community, collection) now has a ‘Discover’ panel giving top hits for each metadata field (such as subject classification, keyword, funder, data type, spatial coverage). The panel acts as a filter when drilling down to different levels,  allowing the most common values to be ‘discovered’ within each section.

The usage statistics at each level  are now publicly viewable as well, so depositors and others can see how often an item is viewed or downloaded. This is useful for many reasons. Users can see what is most useful in the repository; depositors can see if their datasets are being used; stakeholders can compare the success of different communities. By being completely open and transparent, this is a step towards ‘alt-metrics’ or alternative ways measuring scholarly or scientific impact. The repository is now also part of IRUS-UK, (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK), which uses the COUNTER standard to make repository usage statistics nationally comparable.

What’s coming?

Stay tuned for future improvements around a new look and feel, preview and display by data type, streaming support, bittorent downloading, and Linked Open Data.

Robin Rice
EDINA and Data Library

Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: Jan – Feb 2015

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The Library and University Collections (L&UC) in association with project partner Manchester University received funding from the Jisc “Research Data Spring” programme to define and develop an open source Data Vault application which will allow data creators to describe and store data safely in one of the growing number of archival storage options. Phase 1 of the project started in March 2015.

The University of Edinburgh (UoE) were invited to contribute to a series of EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Compliance Case Studies. Stuart MacDonald, RDM Service Coordinator, was interviewed by Jisc and the DCC in relation to the RDM programme and institutional compliancy with forthcoming EPSRC research data expectations. The case study will be published on the Jisc website in May 2015.

RDM Service Coordinator Stuart MacDonald co-presented with Rory Macneil (RSpace) their practice paper “Service Integration to Enhance RDM: RSpace electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) case study” at the International Conference on Digital Curation (IDCC) in London (Feb 2015). The paper has been published in the International Journal of Digital Curation (http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/10.1.163), open access.

The RDM Service Coordinator also presented on ‘RDM Training Initiatives @ Edinburgh’ at the “Comparing Notes: Training Librarians for Research Data Management and Open Science Support” workshop at IDCC.

An EPSRC Expectations Awareness Survey was sent out to 98 EPSRC grant holders of which 38 responded. 9** grant holders agreed to participate in a follow-up interview. The findings of the interviews will follow shortly. Dr Evamaria Krause (Marburgh University, Germany) completed a 6 week internship with L&UC where she assisted with the EPSRC Expectations Awareness Survey and EPSRC grant holder interview exercises.

All Schools in the College of Humanities and Social Science (CHSS) have now added links to RDM Programme website and other RDM pages via their intranets. RDM Project Plan deadlines and deliverables which underpin the RDM Roadmap have been updated.* For more details visit the RDM Programme wiki (some content only available to UoE staff).

Four tailored Data Management Plans sessions have been organised with research groups in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and CHSS, and two workshops for the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) conference in Edinburgh are scheduled to run in June 2015.

Edinburgh DataShare release 1.71 has been announced with new features including faceted browsing, SOLR usage statistics, size limit on assisted deposit of items increased from 5Gb to 10Gb.

DataSync (a Dropbox-like service in development) was themed and made available for beta testing to Information Services colleagues.

Links:

* IT Infrastructure input pending
** 1 PhD student who was forwarded the survey agreed to be interviewed

Stuart Macdonald
RDM Service Coordinator

Data Vault project kickoff meeting

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Last week, members of the Data Vault project got together for the kickoff meeting.  Hosted at the University of Manchester Library, we were able to discuss the project plan, milestones for the three month project, agreed terminology for parts of the system, and started to assign tasks to project members for the first month.

Being only three months long, the project is being run in three one-month chunks. These are defined as follows:

  1. Month 1: Define and Investigate: This phase will allow us to agree what the Data Vault should do, and how it does it,  Specifically it will look at:
    1. What are the use cases for the Data Vault
    2. How do we describe the system (create overview diagrams)
    3. How should the data be packed (metadata + data) for long term archival storage
    4. Develop example workflows for how the Data Vault could be used in the research process
    5. Examine the capabilities of archival storage systems to ensure they can support the proposed Data Vault
  2. Month 2: Requirements and Design: This phase will create the requirements specification and initial design of the system:
    1. Define the requirements specification
    2. Use the requirement specification to design the Data Vault system
  3. Month 3: Develop a Proof of Concept: This phase will seek to develop a minimal proof of concept that demonstrates the concept of the Data Vault:
    1. Deliver a working proof of concept that can describe and archive some data, and then retrieve it

At the end of month three, we will prepare for the second Jisc Data Spring sandpit workshop where we will seek to extend the project to take the prototype and develop it into a full system.

All of this is being documented in the project plan, which is a ‘living document’ that is constantly evolving as the project progresses.  The plan is online as a Google Document:

Look out for further blog posts during the month as we undertake the definitions and investigations!

Kickoff meeting

Originally posted on the Jisc Data Vault blog, April 7, 2015 by Stuart Lewis, Deputy Director, Library & University Collections.