Edinburgh supports trial data publication

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I recently read in a Sense about Science tweet that a lone student asked the Principal of the University of Edinburgh if it would join the AllTrials Campaign and it became the first Scottish University to do so. Here’s his story – [Editor]

As a Nurse I frequently talk with patients about the treatments and medications they receive. These are often difficult conversations as it relies on the clinician having a library of background knowledge coupled with the most up-to-date data. Despite the wealth of knowledge that exists within the medical community there is an increasing body of research that highlights the large amount of clinical trial data that has gone unshared for many decades. This is the origin of the AllTrials campaign.

AllTrials logo

The best estimate is that around half of clinical trials have never been published. Recognising the need for change a group of academics founded AllTrials. AllTrials is an initiative headed by leading academic bodies such as the British Medical Journal, the Oxford Centre for Evidence-based Medicine and the Cochrane Collaboration. AllTrials calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their full methods and summary results reported.

As a Nursing graduate of The University of Edinburgh and a current masters student within the Nursing department I felt I should engage with my University about the issue of clinical trial data sharing and about the AllTrials campaign. I wrote to Professor Sir Timothy O’Shea, the Principal of the University, who gave his support for AllTrials. As of July 2014 The University of Edinburgh became the first Scottish University to register its support for AllTrials. This move is inherently positive for Edinburgh, both as a global leader in health care and as an institution with a longstanding Edinburgh Data Library history. The campaign has had nearly 80,000 people sign its petition as well as just under 500 organisations register support.

This is an issue important issue for all of us. Show your support by signing the AllTrials petition.

Adam Lloyd
Nurse
Masters of Nursing in Clinical Research student
The University of Edinburgh

The views expressed are my own and do not reflect the views of The University of Edinburgh, the AllTrials campaign or any of its affiliates.

RDM Roadmap: Completion of Phase 1

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The Research Data Management (RDM) Programme is well underway with planning and pilot activity (phase 0 of the RDM Roadmap), and initial roll-out of primary services (phase 1) completed. Services include:

  • DMPonline – an online tool by the Digital Curation Centre that assists researchers to produce an effective data management plan (DMP) to cater for the whole lifecycle of a project
  • Research Data Blog – set up by the RDM Action Group to communicate progress on the RDM programme.
  • RDM Website – a One Stop Shop for all university RDM materials (FAQs, key messages, RDM planning guidance, service guides)
  • Research Data MANTRA – an online course designed for researchers or others planning to manage digital data as part of the research process
  • Edinburgh DataShare – the online digital repository of multi-disciplinary research datasets produced at the University of Edinburgh
  • DataStore – a new central facility to store data actively used in current research activities. DataStore provides all researchers with a free at point of use allocation (currently 0.5TB). Researchers can assign up to 50% (0.25TB) of their free individual allocation to shared project spaces. Additional capacity can be purchased above this, with support for very large data (>1PB) hosting available.

Phase 2: (June 2014 – May 2015) will see continued rollout and maturation of services. Services in development include:

  • the Data Asset Registry (DAR) – a catalogue of data assets produced by researchers working for the University of Edinburgh to aid discovery access and reuse
  • the Data Vault – a secure, private and long-term ‘vault’ of data that is only accessible by the creator or their representative

We are currently gathering requirements to inform design of the DAR and Data Vault services. Upcoming Roadmap milestones will subsequently tackle requisite interoperation between existing and planned RDM services.

There are a number of different groups within the university and outside with whom we need to communicate our RDM programme. These include research active staff, support and administrative staff, university committees and groups (research policy group, library and IT committees, knowledge strategy committee) as well as external collaborators and stakeholders such as funding bodies etc. This is being done through a variety of communication activities including a range of training programmes on research data management (RDM) in the form of workshops, seminars and drop in sessions to help researchers with research data management issues along with formal and bespoke awareness raising sessions within schools for research and support staff. The clear message that we want to communicate is that the University is committed to and has invested in RDM services, training, and support, and that the University is supporting researchers, encouraging good research practice, and effecting culture change.

The RDM Services will be formally launched by the Principal on 26th August, 2014 along with an associated conference ‘Dealing with Data’ which offers researchers the opportunity to present on any aspect of the challenges and advances in working with data, particularly research data with novel methods of creating, using, storing, visualising or sharing data.

Stuart Macdonald

RDM Services Co-ordinator

 

New data curation profile in History

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Margaret Forrest, Academic Liaison Librarian for the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, is the latest to contribute a data curation profile. She has interviewed researcher Graham J. Black, who is a PhD candidate in the School. His subject is the aerial bombing during the Vietnam War and he has thousands of government documents, articles and pictures to manage.

The profile has been added to previous ones on the DIY RDM Training Kit for Librarians web page created by other librarians participating in the RDM librarian training. The librarians covered five RDM topics in separate two-hour sessions,where they reinforced what was learned in MANTRA through group discussion, exercises from the UK Data Archive, and listening to local experts.

Each librarian was encouraged to complete an independent study as part of the training: interview a researcher and write up a data curation profile. This was designed to test their self-confidence at talking to researchers about RDM, as well as give them the opportunity to ‘share their data’ by publishing the profile on the website.

Margaret described her experience to Anne Donnelly, one of the trainers:

This was definitely the most enjoyable part of the training and I learned so much from this interview process and the writing up (mainly because of the value of what I had learned from the MANTRA course).

The final group of eight academic service librarians completed their training this summer. This completes a deliverable in the University’s RDM Roadmap. More curation profiles are welcome; we may put them in a collection in Edinburgh DataShare. They could be useful learning objects for others doing training in research data support, in terms of thinking critically about RDM practices.

Robin Rice
Data Librarian

Welcome to the new Research Data Management Service Coordinator: Stuart Macdonald

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We welcome Stuart Macdonald to the position of Research Data Management Service Coordinator, as a 1-year secondment for the current post-holder. Stuart will continue the work of developing the research data services provided by Information Services at the University of Edinburgh. Stuart will be working for three quarters of his time on the programme, and the remaining quarter in his current role as Associate Data Librarian for EDINA and the Data Library.

Stuart Macdonald

Stuart has recently returned from a six month secondment at Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research as Data Services Librarian where he co-ordinated the successful Data Seal of Approval trusted repository application for CISER Data Archive as well as modernized archival process and practice.

When not working as service coordinator, Stuart will be working towards gaining the Data Seal of Approval for DataShare, the University’s open data repository.

On the role of service coordinator, Stuart says “This is a marvellous opportunity to be at the heart of research data management activities here at the University and to continue the great work that has already been put in place”