Research Data Support team and DCC to host Skills4EOSC Fellow

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.

 

New Data Visualisation Intern

It’s often said that the best way to achieve your goals is to visualise success. But what if visualisation is your goal? Then get someone clever to do it for you. That’s what we did: hired a new Data Visualisation Intern.

Henry standing on platform with natural scenery (Sidney area)

Henry Sun has joined Research Data Support for the summer to work on our Data Dashboard project. Henry is about to start his 4th year as an undergraduate, studying electronics and computer science. That’s right, he’s doing 2 degrees: our very own Henry Beauclerc. Henry also came to us with previous experience of laboratory research. Impressed? Us too, very.

Just how Henry manages to find time for anything else is a little baffling. But find it he does and with it, among other things, he watches superhero movies – Marvel for preference, obviously. And he cooks: Henry tells us that he already has special skills in Asian, especially Chinese cuisine, and now he’s learning how to bake. You can imagine how popular he’s going to be when his colleagues find out.

This internship is Henry’s first time in a professional services role and that role is to develop a dashboard that will enable us to monitor and to understand all the Open Research activity that goes on at the University of Edinburgh. Primarily, that means tracking down a range of internal and external data sources and figuring out a way to tie them all together and visualise them. And if that’s not enough, we’re hoping that Henry will be able to predict the future, or at least come up with some ideas for ongoing development of the dashboard. Exciting stuff, right? Right.

And what do we plan to do with this shiny new box of numbers? Management teams will want have a look, of course. We in Research Data Support are expecting to get a clearer and more detailed picture of the data management situation across the University: good practice, bad practice, and no practice at all. Knowing all that, especially the last two, will enable us to focus on the areas where we’re needed most. It will also be useful for our three Colleges – Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Science & Engineering, and Medicine & Veterinary Medicine – to see what kind of Open Research their researchers are producing. And speaking of Open Research, we’re aiming to make at least some of this data – headline numbers, etc. – available to the public via our website. It will be nice to show off all the hard work that’s going on in Open Research at Edinburgh as well as all the hard work Henry is doing for us.

Simon Smith
Research Data Support Officer
Library & University Collections

Protocols.io trial… six months on!

We launched a trial of protocols.io Enterprise in December 2019, and a lot has been achieved in the first six months.

The number of registered UoE users has increased from 121 to 217 and the number of private protocols from 36 to 106 which demonstrates a significant interest in using the platform with its additional Enterprise functionality,

We have also run a number of webinars specifically for UoE staff and students which have been well attended.

While these numbers suggest interest amongst our research community in using protocols.io we have to collect better feedback before we can decide if protocols.io Enterprise is to become an ongoing service provided by the University.

That is why we are now launching this short survey about protocols.io which is open to all UoE research staff and students. The aim is to gather initial thoughts from our community and to identify people who may be prepared to contribute more in-depth feedback as the trial progresses.

The survey can be accessed at https://edinburgh.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/protocols-io-6-month-survey

To find out more about protocols.io or this trial you can read this blogpost from when the trial launched: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/2019/12/13/new-research-data-management-tool-on-one-year-trial-protocols-io/

Alternatively please visit our website, where you will also find links to all the protocols.io webinars we have run: https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/research-data-service/during/open-research-tools/protocols

Kerry Miller
Research Data Support Officer
Library & University Collections

Two new Quick Guides for good Research Data Management

The Research Data Support team have recently published two new Quick Guides, the latest in a series of short, user-friendly documents intended to help our research staff and students plan, manage and preserve their data effectively, safely, and for the long-term.

Quick Guide 5 takes the topic of “Open Research” – also known as Open Science, particularly in a European context. The drive towards research transparency and the removal of barriers to accessibility has gathered a great deal of momentum over recent years, to the extent that “Open by default” is an increasingly common approach. Open research enables scientific findings to be tested, reproduced and built upon far more quickly than traditional approaches allowed. The benefits of Open Research are being demonstrated in real time, right in front of our noses, as researchers at Edinburgh tackle various aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic. We recently tweeted about one such project which examined the effectiveness of face coverings in reducing the range travelled by breath, which of course helps transmit the virus. The data underpinning this research is freely available to everyone via Edinburgh DataShare.

The latest Quick Guide, the sixth in the series, addresses the ‘FAIR’ principles, which state that research data should – so far as possible, and appropriate – be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. These principles emphasise machine-actionability (i.e. the ability of automated computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with minimal or no human intervention) as humans increasingly rely on computational means to discover and work with data as a result of the increase in volume, complexity, and creation speed of data.

These two new publications join our existing guidance on topics such as the basics of Research Data Management (RDM), RDM and data protection, and research data storage options at the University. Future topics planned include conducting research safely online, FAIR approaches to research software, and an overview of the systems and services available at Edinburgh in support of Open Research. If there is a particular topic you would find useful, please get in touch with us via data-support@ed.ac.uk or the IS Helpline.

All of our Quick Guides can be found at https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/research-data-service/guidance

Martin Donnelly
Research Data Support Manager
Library and University Collections