Unless you live in a cave, you are probably aware that NSF started requiring that researchers submit a two-page supplement to all proposals titled “Data Management Plan”. To paraphrase from the Grant Proposal Guide, investigators are told they need to discuss:
- Types of data
- Standards they will use for data and metadata
- Policies for access and sharing
- Policies and provisions for re-use
- Plans for archiving, preserving, and providing access to data
Points #3 and #4 were discussed quite a bit last week at the Data Governance Workshop I attended, with much concern from myself over how scientists would be able to find and comprehend these policies. If a room full of librarians, funders, publishers, and experts can’t figure out what policies might apply to scientific data, I began to wonder if scientists had any hope understanding data governance. I think they do, so long as some of the proposed products that will result from the workshop come to fruition.
So where might the Excel add-in we are developing fit into this scheme? The first version of the add-in will likely not have much utility for data governance issues, like setting policies, establishing access rights, and restricting data availability. We do, however, envision that this add-in might provide a framework for future developers to implement tools to facilitate good data governance practices. This might be in the form of a link to an archive’s policy, metadata with provisions for access and use, or other methods.
I like to think that because this add-in is intended to be open-source, it will become a useful tool upon which savvy developers can build in capabilities for things like governance, collaboration, links to social networking tools, etc.
