scholarly journals Effectiveness of data auditing as a tool to reinforce good research data management (RDM) practice: a Singapore study

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Xing Lau ◽  
Ser Lin Celine Lee ◽  
Yusuf Ali

Abstract Background Institutions, funding agencies and publishers are placing increasing emphasis on good research data management (RDM). RDM lapses in medical science can result in questionable data and cause the public’s confidence in the scientific community to crumble. A fledgling medical school in a young university in Singapore has mandated every funded research project to have a data management plan (DMP). However, researchers’ adherence to their DMPs was unknown until the school embarked on routine data auditing. We hypothesize that research data auditing improves RDM awareness, compliance and reception in the school. Methods We conducted surveys with research PIs and researchers before and after data auditing to evaluate differences in self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception. As it is mandatory to deposit research data in a central data repository system in the school, we tracked data deposition by each laboratory from 2 weeks before to 3 months after data auditing as a marker of actual RDM compliance. Results Research data auditing had an overall positive effect on self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception for both research PIs and researchers. Research PIs agreed more that RDM was important to scientific reproducibility, were more aware of proper RDM, had higher RDM strength in their laboratories and were more compliant with the DMP. Both research PIs and researchers believed data auditing helped them to be more compliant with data deposition in the repository. However, data auditing had no significant impact on laboratories’ data deposition rates over time, which could be due to the short sampling period. Conclusions Research PIs and researchers generally felt that data auditing was effective in improving RDM practices. It helped to evaluate their RDM practices objectively, propose corrective actions for RDM lapses and spread awareness of the university’s data management policies. Our findings corroborated other studies in medical research, geosciences, engineering and ethics that data auditing promotes good RDM practices. Hence, we recommend research institutions worldwide to adopt data auditing as a tool to reinforce research integrity.

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karlheinz Pappenberger

>> See video of presentation (33 min.)On 29th July 2014 the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany, has launched an e-science initiative to build up a powerful, efficient and innovative information infrastructure for all universities, research institutions and universities of applied science of the county of southwest Germany. With the overall budget of 3.7 million euro action plans within the five areas licensing, digitalization, research data management, open access and virtual research environments shall be worked out within the next years.Within this framework an 18-month project has been launched at the beginning of 2014 to evaluate the needs of services and support libraries and IT service centres should offer for researchers in the area of research data management. In this “bwFDM communities” named project full time key accounters have been established at all 9 universities of the county (Freiburg, Heidelberg, Hohenheim, Karlsruhe, Konstanz, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Tuebingen and Ulm; among them national and international highly ranked universities). The task of the key accounters is to identity concrete needs and requirements of all research groups working with research data (in a broad sense including all areas of science, social science and humanities) at each of the nine universities as well as possible solutions by conducting semi-structured personal interviews and documenting them in the form of user stories. As a result issues of importance and requirements will be identified, categorized and finalized to recommendations for concrete action plans.The presentation will give an overview of the first results of the project, thereby also highlighting the roles libraries and IT service centres are expected to play from the researcher´s point of view. Furthermore the presentation will point out the response of the University of Konstanz Library to the rising awareness of the importance of research data within the University Executive, showing the special efforts the University of Konstanz Library undertakes to support researchers in their research data management so far and to build up more and more expertise in the area of research data management. One step had been the set-up of a disciplinary data repository in the field of ornithology (Movebank data repository).


Author(s):  
Marie Timmermann

Open Science aims to enhance the quality of research by making research and its outputs openly available, reproducible and accessible. Science Europe, the association of major Research Funding Organisations and Research Performing Organisations, advocates data sharing as one of the core aspects of Open Science and promotes a more harmonised approach to data sharing policies. Good research data management is a prerequisite for Open Science and data management policies should be aligned as much as possible, while taking into account discipline-specific differences. Research data management is a broad and complex field with many actors involved. It needs collective efforts by all actors to work towards aligned policies that foster Open Science.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rozália Zeller ◽  
Szabolcs Hoczopán ◽  
Gyula Nagy

Following the national and international trends in mid-2020 the Klebelsberg Kuno Library of the University of Szeged has also started to deal with the issue of research data management. After thorough self-training the library staff studied the Hungarian and international best practices of managing research data. We tried to assess the needs of the institutional research data management habits and the opinion of the researchers of SZTE with a comprehensive questionnaire. We compiled a comprehensive questionnaire to assess the needs of our researchers, learn what they’re thinking about RDM and what kind of practices regarding RDM already exist in the research community. By evaluating the questionnaire we have determined the areas in which the library could provide professional assistance where there was a real need among researchers. Keeping in mind the needs of the research community of University of Szeged we have decided to develop the following services: copyright consulting, RDM trainings for PhD students, theoretical and methodological assistance for RDM, write institutional FAIR data management recommendations. The last four services have been successfully implemented. We also wrote a feasibility study to assess the possibilities of developing our own institutional data repository.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-170
Author(s):  
Jennifer Kaari

A Review of: Elsayed, A. M., & Saleh, E. I. (2018). Research data management and sharing among researchers in Arab universities: An exploratory study. IFLA Journal, 44(4), 281–299. https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035218785196 Abstract Objective – To investigate researchers’ practices and attitudes regarding research data management and data sharing. Design – Email survey. Setting – Universities in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Subjects – Surveys were sent to 4,086 academic faculty researchers. Methods – The survey was emailed to faculty at three Arab universities, targeting faculty in the life sciences and engineering. The survey was created using Google Docs and remained open for five months. Participants were asked basic demographic questions, questions regarding their research data and metadata practices, and questions regarding their data sharing practices. Main Results – The authors received 337 responses, for a response rate of 8%. The results showed that 48.4% of respondents had a data management plan and that 97% were responsible for preserving their own data. Most respondents stored their research data on their personal storage devices. The authors found that 64.4% of respondents reported sharing their research data. Respondents most frequently shared their data by publishing in a data research journal, sharing through academic social networks such as ResearchGate, and providing data upon request to peers. Only 5.1% of respondents shared data through an open data repository.  Of those who did not share data, data privacy and confidentiality were the most common reasons cited. Of the respondents who did share their data, contributing to scientific progress and increased citation and visibility were the primary reasons for doing so. A total of 59.6% of respondents stated that they needed more training in research data management from their universities. Conclusion – The authors conclude that researchers at Arab universities are still primarily responsible for their own data and that data management planning is still a new concept to most researchers. For the most part, the researchers had a positive attitude toward data sharing, although depositing data in open repositories is still not a widespread practice. The authors conclude that in order to encourage strong data management practices and open data sharing among Arab university researchers, more training and institutional support is needed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Hua Nie ◽  
Pengcheng Luo ◽  
Ping Fu

Research Data Management (RDM) has become increasingly important for more and more academic institutions. Using the Peking University Open Research Data Repository (PKU-ORDR) project as an example, this paper will review a library-based university-wide open research data repository project and related RDM services implementation process including project kickoff, needs assessment, partnerships establishment, software investigation and selection, software customization, as well as data curation services and training. Through the review, some issues revealed during the stages of the implementation process are also discussed and addressed in the paper such as awareness of research data, demands from data providers and users, data policies and requirements from home institution, requirements from funding agencies and publishers, the collaboration between administrative units and libraries, and concerns from data providers and users. The significance of the study is that the paper shows an example of creating an Open Data repository and RDM services for other Chinese academic libraries planning to implement their RDM services for their home institutions. The authors of the paper have also observed since the PKU-ORDR and RDM services implemented in 2015, the Peking University Library (PKUL) has helped numerous researchers to support the entire research life cycle and enhanced Open Science (OS) practices on campus, as well as impacted the national OS movement in China through various national events and activities hosted by the PKUL.


Author(s):  
Falco Jonas Hüser ◽  
Paula Maria Martinez Lavanchy

Modern research institutions are faced with rapidly increasing challenges imposed by data-driven science and have to deal with new demands from funding agencies and publishers regarding open access to research data as well as from the Code of Conduct for Research Integrity on reproducibility of results. In reply to these requirements, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has adapted a two-fold strategy of bringing together decision-makers, relevant support units in the administration and researchers from all departments for the task of designing policies and services in alignment with common traditions in the different fields of research. This mixed “bottom-up” / “top-down” approach ensures that best practices  for research data management can be implemented in the daily routines of employees in a practical and supportive way while ensuring that the researchers can live up to all relevant administrative, legal and ethical standards.  In this presentation, we will show how DTU Library has taken over a central position in this process by investigating the needs and demands from researchers in the different fields, drafting procedures and guidelines for research data management and establishing support functions and training for all aspects  of the data life cycle. Within this new and complex area, the creation of new positions for research data management at the library in addition to an optimal utilization of existing resources and knowledge has been crucial for building up the necessary expertise and thus for the success of the strategy.  AuthorsFalco Jonas Hüser, PhDProject Officer – Research Data Managementemail: [email protected] 0000-0001-9645-6691Paula Maria Martinez Lavanchy, PhDProject Officer – Research Data Managementemail: [email protected] 0000-0003-1448-0917


Author(s):  
Wade Bishop ◽  
Hannah Collier ◽  
Ashley Marie Orehek ◽  
Monica Ihli

As many sciences move to be more data-intensive, some science librarians are offering more research data services and perform research data management roles. Job analyses provide insight and context to the tasks employees actually do versus what their job descriptions depict or employers assume. Two separate job analyses studies investigated the roles and responsibilities of data services librarians and research integrity officers among the top 10 private and top 10 public higher education institutions. The focus of these interviews was research data management support roles. Comparing these two groups’ responses indicates that the role-based responsibilities for research data services are not always clear within institutions and are predominantly placed on individual researchers or research teams, but science librarians may provide some solutions to address this gap. This paper presents a model for the potential roles of science librarians in research data management.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Rice ◽  
Çuna Ekmekcioglu ◽  
Jeff Haywood ◽  
Sarah Jones ◽  
Stuart Lewis ◽  
...  

This paper discusses work to implement the University of Edinburgh Research Data Management (RDM) policy by developing the services needed to support researchers and fulfil obligations within a changing national and international setting. This is framed by an evolving Research Data Management Roadmap and includes a governance model that ensures cooperation amongst Information Services (IS) managers and oversight by an academic-led steering group. IS has taken requirements from research groups and IT professionals, and at the request of the steering group has conducted pilot work involving volunteer research units within the three colleges to develop functionality and presentation for the key services. The first pilots cover three key services: the data store, a customisation of the Digital Curation Centre’s DMPonline tool, and the data repository. The paper will report on the plans, achievements and challenges encountered while we attempt to bring the University of Edinburgh RDM Roadmap to fruition.


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