Protocols.io Update

Our Open Research Coordinator, Kerry Miller, has written the following update to users of the protocols.io platform at the University of Edinburgh. While this relates directly to researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the issues raised neatly highlight the challenges and barriers that open research still faces more broadly.

Edinburgh Open Research logo

On the 31st December 2024 our subscription to protocols.io will end and we have taken the difficult decision not to renew it. The reason for this is that in 2023 the company that developed protocols.io sold it to the academic publisher Springer Nature and they have decided to impose an increase in subscription cost of over 700% for 2025. Until now the subscription costs have been met from library budgets, if we continued the subscription we would need to start recouping costs directly from users and these would be somewhere in the region of £250-300 per person for 2025.

We have carefully evaluated how protocols.io is being used by staff and students and we do not feel that we can justify spending so much more for membership of this platform or that the majority of current users would be willing or able to meet the costs from their current grants. We realise that this will be disappointing and inconvenient for researchers and the Research Data Service team is here to help. If you have any questions about how this change will impact you please read the FAQ and if that does not answer all of your questions, or you would like support moving to another platform please email us using data-support@ed.ac.uk.

You can find out more on our protocols.io page https://library.ed.ac.uk/research-support/research-data-service/during/open-research-tools/protocols

Library Research Support Shortlisted for Times Higher Education Award

This is a guest blog post written by Dominic Tate, Associate Director, Head of Library Research Support

We were delighted to learn that the Library Research Support Team, of which the Research Data Service is a part of, has been shortlisted for ‘Outstanding Library Team of the Year’ in the 2024 Times Higher Education (THE) Awards. These prestigious national awards are sometimes dubbed the “Oscars of higher education” and we understand that there were a record number of submissions this year.

Logo for THE Awards

This nomination reflects the pioneering work the team has done in the area of rights retention, open research and citizen science.

Members of the Library Research Support Team will be attending a black tie dinner and award ceremony in Birmingham on 28th November; competition is fierce and there are some excellent entries, so please keep your fingers crossed for us.

Evelyn Williams, new Research Data Support Assistant

Hello, readers of Edinburgh Research Data Blog!

Last month I joined the University’s Research Data Service team as a Research Data Support Assistant, and I’m excited to be back at the University after three long years working as a data scientist at tech start-ups.

A photo of the author in Barcelona.

Me with a bag of churros in the Montjuïc, Barcelona, where I spent a few months in the winter of 2022 – Photo credit: Evelyn Williams

This career pivot from tech into collections management feels natural to me as a lifelong collector and cataloguer. An early memory is winning a Stanley plastic small parts organiser at a village tombola, the kind you’d use to store picture hooks and screws. I’d never seen a more magical object in my life. I began hunting for groups of items tiny enough to fit in the compartments like it was my life’s work. Elastic bands, our Labrador’s fur during moulting season, glittery hair beads (it was the early 2000s), woodlice. My favourite present from last birthday was a Dymo label maker. When I first read the description for this role, working to archive the University’s research data sounded like a dream come true. It’s especially exciting to be dipping my toe into data management at a university where RDM is already so well established, thanks to the work of Robin Rice and the many others involved in developing the department and the University’s data management policy.

I’ve been curious about archives and collections for a long time. I loved interning as a Collections Assistant in Special Collections at the Sir Duncan Rice Library in 2017 while I was an undergraduate Linguistics student at the University of Aberdeen. I helped run the reading room, assisted with manuscript conservation and digitising, and carried out archive research for the Library’s exhibition. Exploring the stacks of manuscripts and ephemera, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. The highlight of my job was getting to see a volume of Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-1838). It was an incredibly special experience for lots of reasons – the sheer size of the book (it’s a meter tall!), the beauty of the illustrations, and the depictions of bird species that are now extinct. An example of an illustration of owls is shown below.

Barn owl illustration from Audubon's Birds of America.

Audubon, J. J. (1840) Barn Owl. The birds of America, plate CLXXI. New York, J.J. Audubon; Philadelphia, J.B. Chevalier. Photo credit: The John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, Montgomery County Audubon Collection, and Zebra Publishing.

The photo below was included in the exhibition I worked on about medical innovation in wartime. So dramatic!

A photo of a nurse tying Sir Henry Gray’s surgical mask

A nurse tying Sir Henry Gray’s surgical mask. Photo credit: George Washington Wilson & Co. (1853 – 1908). DR GRAY ROYAL INFIRMARY ABERDEEN. [Photograph]. Aberdeen: The University of Aberdeen. GB 0231 MS 3792/D0500, George Washington Wilson & Co. photographic collection.

I’m thrilled to be back at the University and working with researchers again. The last time I worked here was three years ago as a Research Assistant while doing my master’s in Speech and Language Processing, helping researchers in the Centre for Speech Technology Research to evaluate audio processing models like computer-generated voices. I learned so much by being involved in lots of different research projects, and I’m looking forward to the huge scope of people and projects I’ll support in my new role.

That role was also where I first saw the potential of open data sharing. The University’s most accessed DataShare dataset was developed and shared by colleagues at CSTR, and has since been used and cited by research teams around the world, including at Google, Deepmind, and Meta as well as at countless universities. Making this speech data publicly available has contributed to big improvements in, for example, the speech devices used by many people with Motor Neurone Disease, and in the algorithms hearing aids use to make speech clearer.

Sharing your research data may sometimes seem like an afterthought to a project, but it can have a far-reaching impact and accelerate scientific progress. My hope is that in my new role I can help to further open research in a small way.

This photo from the TORGO project captures the process of recording facial movement during speech using an electromagnetic articulograph machine

Photo credit: The University of Toronto. (2012). Subject in AG500. The TORGO Database: Acoustic and Articulatory Speech From Speakers With Dysarthria. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~complingweb/data/TORGO/torgo.html

This photo from the TORGO project captures the process of recording facial movement during speech using an electromagnetic articulograph machine. I used the TORGO dataset during my masters research, and I was grateful the researchers had published their data for academic use.

After I finished my masters I worked as a data scientist at a couple of tech start-ups, building artificial intelligence models. While I enjoy writing code and working on complex engineering projects, I didn’t like the restricted field of vision you have when you’re working to solve a narrow commercial problem. I’m happy to be in a more social role where I can support lots of different people and projects.

Photograph of a mug made by the author.

Some mugs I made for our most recent Open Studios event at Abbeymount Studios.

So far, the Research Data Service team has been really welcoming, and I feel lucky to be working with such knowledgeable and friendly people. I’ll be working 3.5 days a week with the RDS team, and on my other days I’ll likely be at the pottery studio, please see photo above, or reading. My collection of graphic novels is getting out of control, and I love fiction where nothing much happens but everything is just a bit unsettling. At the moment I’m trying to read everything by and about Shirley Jackson, as well as novels about disgruntled tech workers. Everyone I know is sick of me trying to get them to download the Libby app. (“It’s like Audible. But it’s FREE!”).

Evelyn Williams,

Research Data Support Assistant

Skills4EOSC fellowship

This is a guest blog post from Clara Parente Boavida, about her fellowship with the Research Data Service as part of a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) project.

My name is Clara Parente Boavida and I work in the Research Support Office at Iscte-Instituto Universitario de Lisboa (Portugal). I applied for the first call of the Skills4EOSC Fellowship Programme and between 11th March to 5th April I worked with an amazing team at Research Data Service at the University of Edinburgh.

The Skills4EOSC Fellowship Programme aims to address the need to promote and sustain professional roles dedicated to open research by supporting short-term secondments.

Among the three different types of fellowships, I have chosen a Research Data Support internship. This placement allowed me to actively participate in the day-to-day activities related to research data support, providing an immersive experience and a comprehensive understanding of research data management practices within the host institution.

I would like to congratulate the Skills4EOSC project for this initiative and thank everyone who has helped to make this opportunity possible. I’m grateful for the support of my institution (Vice-Rector Jorge Costa and Carina Cunha), I’m grateful to Robin Rice for the extraordinary welcome and I’m grateful to all the people I’ve had the opportunity to talk to and interact with during this month.

“the essential is invisible to the eyes”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel “The Little Prince”

Each week’s agenda was carefully prepared with my expectations and interests in mind. The University of Edinburgh has a busy life in terms of Research Data Management. Not only in collaboration with various services within the University, but also with the external community. This holistic view has made me reflect about the different services that Research Data Management intersects with. Success comes from healthy and effective relationships with different stakeholders.

Photo collage of Clara's activities in Edinburgh.

I was involved in the day-to-day activities of different members of the team, and each experience added something new. I had the opportunity to attend face-to-face events, one-to-one meetings, kick-off meetings, as well as online meetings and events. I also took part in internal team meetings and service meetings. Informal activities were carefully planned to allow the Research Data Service team to interact with each other and to allow other teams to be involved.

I had one-to-one meetings with each member of the Research Data Support team about: DataShare, DataVaut, training programme, DMP, DMPonline, Research Data Management Policy and Metrics. I had one-to-one meetings with members of other teams: Open Research, Scholarly Communications, Research Information Systems, Digital Research Services, and Edinburgh Research Office.

I attended a number of events in person: Digital Research Lunchtime Seminar: How to interpret and analyse your data efficiently; Open Research Scotland Meeting; Open Science Framework Workshop Modules 1, 2, 3 & 4; Ethics & Data Management at the Childlight GDF Residency; Technomoral Conversations: Who is Responsible for Responsible AI?; Library Tour for Staff, and Digital Research Lunchtime Seminar: Manage, publish, share and preserve.

I also participated in online events: Updating the DataCite Metadata Scheme webinar; UK Research Network (UKRN) webinar on Indicators for Open Research; UKRN Indicators Pilot 2 online meeting; UKRN Pilot 1 kick-off meeting; Writing a Data management plan, for the Health in Social Science School; and Working with Personal and Sensitive Data. I also had the opportunity to organise an online meeting with Mike Wallis (Research Services, IT Infrastructure) and the IT Services of Iscte to answer questions about DataStore.

In terms of personal contributions, I wrote suggestions for updates to MANTRA Unit 1, part of an open access Research Data Management Training course. I had the opportunity to demonstrate the interoperability process between CRIS systems and OpenAIRE, and also how to link EC funded projects to publications and datasets.

Finally, I designed a Research Data Management Roadmap for the Iscte. This roadmap intends to guide the work to be developed over the next three years towards the implementation of a RDM Service for the Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. It incorporates lessons learned during the Skills4EOSC Fellowship Programme at the University of Edinburgh. It is also aligned with the Human Resources Excellence in Research Award (HRS4R) principles for researchers, which is a mechanism through which the European Commission seeks to ensure that concrete steps are put in place by institutions to enhance working conditions for researchers across Europe, as set out in the European Charter and Code.