IDEA: Improving Data Engagement and Advocacy – Details, episodes & analysis

That's a wrap on season three of IDEA! As in seasons past, we're celebrating with our interviewees one final time as we ask them a new set of data management questions:

• If your role in research data management had a motto, what would it be?

• What’s the most creative solution you’ve seen to encourage researchers to embrace data management?
• If you could host a workshop on one exciting aspect of data management, what would the focus be?

As always, a big thank you to our guests this season: Kristin Briney, Carla Strubbia, Alessandra Soro, Matt Mayernik, Andrew Johnson, Claudius Mundoma, and Amber Gallant.

We couldn't do it without you!

In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome Amber Gallant, Data Services Librarian at Royal Roads University, who will be sharing with us details about her innovative project, Byte-Sized Data Encounters. Amber was faced with the challenge of teaching doctoral students with limited time and the unique needs of a largely online program adoptable data management skills and she adopted an extremely creative approach. She used a micro-education approach which reimagined traditional training by weaving in short, engaging, and hands-on activities to spark curiosity, promote practical learning, empower doctoral students with data management skills, and make the material memorable. Together, we’ll explore how this informal, scaffolded model builds confidence and helps students develop data practices.

Amber Gallant is the Data Services Librarian at Royal Roads University. She is interested in data equity and accessibility issues, data justice (or, examining how people are fairly or unfairly represented as a result of their production of data!), data reuse, and exploring sources of secondary data. She brings this work to RRU in discussing data collection and methodologies, among other topics, with faculty and students conducting research. Outside work, she enjoys baking overly complicated desserts, attempting to sample every cheese known to humanity, and exploring the beautiful, unceded lands stewarded to this day by the Lekwungen-speaking peoples.

Resources Mentioned:

Byte-Sized Data Encounters OSF project: 10.17605/OSF.IO/K46C5

In this episode, Shannon and Briana delve into the recently published NSF funded Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative's report titled, "Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expenses." The report provides a retrospective analysis of the costs incurred by six academic institutions in making research data publicly accessible and offers recommendations and considerations for researchers, institutions, and funding agencies. 

Report citation:

Hoeflich Mohr, Alicia, Jake Carlson, Lizhao Ge, Joel Herndon, Wendy Kozlowski, Jennifer Moore, Jonathan Petters, Shawna Taylor, and Cynthia Hudson Vitale. Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expense. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, February 2024. ⁠https://doi.org/10.29242/report.radsexpense2024⁠

Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative: ⁠https://www.arl.org/realities-of-academic-data-sharing-rads-initiative/

In today’s episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with data stewards from the University of Vienna, who’ve created a training program with courses catering to PhD students, technical staff, and specific disciplines. The training covers general data management and specific topics such as support for particular infrastructure. And not only are they offering this training to their community, but they have taken active steps to assess the effectiveness of their training program. 

Monika Bargmann is the Data Stewardess for the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Bringing people and information together and "translating" between diverse groups of stakeholders is the common thread through Monika's nearly 30 years of professional experience. Before joining the University of Vienna in June 2022, she worked as a librarian, archivist, research assistant, lecturer, data manager, and IT project coordinator. Monika holds master-level degrees in Library and Information Studies (FH Burgenland, Austria, and HBI Stuttgart, Germany) and in German Literary Studies (University of Vienna, Austria). She attended the “Data Librarian” and “Data Steward” certificate courses at the University of Vienna. Her professional passion is currently the long-term preservation of websites and web applications. Monika collects fiction with librarian characters, loves trees and forests, and is a Trekkie. Michael Feichtinger works as a data steward at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna. In this role, Michael supports researchers with data management and the adoption of FAIR data practices.

Since March of 2023, Emily J. Kate has served as the Data Steward for the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Vienna. She holds a BA in anthropology and archaeology from the College of Wooster in Ohio and earned her MA and PhD in anthropology and demography from The Pennsylvania State University. Emily describes herself as "scientifically nosey" and enjoys connecting with scientists and developing custom solutions that meet their unique requests. In addition to helping researchers make their data management dreams come true, Emily is an avid baker and loves picnicking on the Danube with her husband, Zachary, and her perfect dog, Zoa. Research Data Management for the Life Sciences Course Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10512974

Research Data Management for the Life Sciences Course GitHub: https://github.com/feichtingerm/rdmlifesciunivie

Liascript: https://liascript.github.io/

Shannon and Briana discuss the article: A Tiered Model for Data Management, Curation, and Sharing Support in Grant Proposals and Budgets in the Journal of eScience Librarianship. This case study discusses differing levels of support for researchers during projects, challenges arising from the tiered support model, and monitoring metrics from those using the services.

Article citation: Johnson, A., (2023) “A Tiered Model for Data Management, Curation, and Sharing Support in Grant Proposals and Budgets”, Journal of eScience Librarianship 12(2), e702. doi: https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.702

There are many examples of embedded data curators that different institutions use to support their researchers' data management practices. But no two programs seem to work in the same way, or exist in the same setting. In this episode, we’re going to hear about an embedded data management and curation support service in the context of a US national lab, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The Advance Team is a group of librarians, curators, and engineers who work with various projects across the lab to support good data management practices. Dr. Erin Iesulauro Barker is a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She has over 20 years of experience in computational modeling of the mechanical behavior of materials at multiple length scales, developing computational tools for automatically generating digital material samples, and developing highly parallel solver frameworks. Dr. Barker's current research focuses on integrating physical experiments, physics-based predictive simulations, and data analytics in robust frameworks to accelerate scientific understanding, process control, and the adoption of advanced manufacturing techniques in production. This work also encompasses developing a culture of intentional data stewardship, cross-training of materials scientists and data scientists, and building an Artificial Intelligence for Materials Science (AIMS) community across the laboratory and with key university partners.

Michael Hofmockel has provided strategic leadership to a dynamic team dedicated to comprehensive research information management. Overseeing major data platforms, including the DataHub Platform, Michael Hofmockel emphasizes user-centered, standards-based continuity across projects, supporting researchers throughout the research lifecycle. Michael fosters collaboration and champions strategic success within the Research Computing Leadership team. Michael significantly contributed to the Advance Team's success by leveraging over three decades of data engineering and research experience. Michael has nurtured an environment conducive to scientific innovation by demonstrating scholarly communication and talent development expertise. Looking ahead, Michael's passion for fostering innovation positions them well to contribute to the ongoing success of the Research Computing Division at PNNL.

Thomas Serrano is a Data Engineer at PNNL who does a lot of work involving the creation of data pipelines at the lab instrument level. This can involve moving, storing, or utilizing data in real-time to help with experiments. He graduated from the University of Washington in 2022 with a Bachelor of Science in Informatics with a concentration in Data Science.

Shannon and Briana discuss the article "The Effects of Research Data Management Services: Associating the Data Curation Lifecycle with Open Research Output" published in ACRL. They discuss how institutional contexts can influence a researcher's ability and desire to produce open data products, the impact of investing in RDM services and resources, and whether the data curation lifecycle impacts a researcher sharing their data.

Article citation: Pares, N., & Organisciak, P. (2023). The Effects of Research Data Management Services: Associating the Data Curation Lifecycle with Open Research Output. College & Research Libraries, 84(5), 751. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.5.751

Research increasingly requires working with both large amounts of data as well as diverse types of data. Additionally, data reuse is being encouraged as a means to build on previous research and to enable answering larger and more complex problems through combining data sources. So, how can data producers make their data more openly available and reusable? And how can generating data and providing open access to it be an engagement opportunity?

The Ocean Observatories (OOI) is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1743430 to gather, distribute, and preserve real-time data of the world’s oceans. Their effort is an exceptional example of a project that makes immense amounts of data openly available in understandable ways as well as actively engages users of these data to further reuse potential. 

Dr. James Edson is a Senior Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering and the Lead PI of the Program Management Office (PMO) of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). 

Jeffrey Glatstein is the Senior Manager of Cyberinfrastructure and Data Delivery Lead at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the National Science Foundations' Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). 

Craig Risien is the Project Manager for the National Science Foundations' Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure data center. 

Resources Mentioned:

https://oceanobservatories.org/

https://dataexplorer.oceanobservatories.org/

For the season finale, we're doing something a little different. As we've interviewed our guests over the course of the year, we've been asking each group same set of four questions, all related to research data management. What makes something an engagement opportunity? How do you define a dataset? What one piece of information do you wish all researchers knew about RDM? And what’s the best data success you’ve ever seen? Now, we bring you the answers.

A big thank you to our guests this season: Julie Goldman, Sarah Hauserman, Karl Benedict, Jon Wheeler, Anna Sackmann, Elliott Smith, Amy Neeser, Lena Karvovskaya, Dan Rudmann, Stephanie van de Sandt, Meron Vermaas, Cynthia Hudson Vitale, Shawna Taylor, Jake Carlson, and Jonathon Petters.

With the increased focus on research reproducibility and transparency, new policies, practices, and principles have been established for research data management. As this area has and continues to rapidly change, we have also seen the development of research data management services to support researchers in adopting or adapting practices to meet these new expectations. But what form have these service models taken and what works and what doesn’t?

Many RDM support service models initiated in Libraries, but have discovered that to fully support researchers a multi-stakeholder service model is necessary because research practice and researchers’ questions require expertise across research data management, IT, research computing, and security. And while many examples of these multi-stakeholder service models exist, there are still gaps as well as potential to improve on existing models.

In this episode, we will be reviewing an article published in the Journal of eScience Librarianship on February 15th as part of the 2022 Research Data Alliance and Preservation (RDAP) Summit special issue. The article is titled “There’s no “I” in Research Data Management: Reshaping RDM Services Toward a Collaborative Multi-Stakeholder Model” and was authored by Alisa B. Rod, Biru Zhou, and Marc-Etienne Rousseau.

Article citation: Rod, A. B. & Zhou, B. & Rousseau, M., (2023) “There's no "I" in Research Data Management: Reshaping RDM Services Toward a Collaborative Multi-Stakeholder Model”, Journal of eScience Librarianship 12(1), 1–17. doi: https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.624