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Science Boot Camp West

Last week Stanford Libraries hosted the third annual Science Boot Camp West (SBCW 2015),

“… building on the great Science Boot Camp events held at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2013 and at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2014. Started in Massachusetts and spreading throughout the USA, science boot camps for librarians are 2.5 day events featuring workshops and educational presentations delivered by scientists with time for discussion and information sharing among all the participants. Most of the attendees are librarians involved in supporting research in the sciences, engineering, medicine or technology although anybody with an interest in science research is welcome.”

As a former researcher and newcomer to the library and research data management (RDM) scenes, I was already familiar with many of the considerable challenges on both sides of the equation (Jake Carlson recently summarized the plight of data librarians). What made SBCW 2015 such an excellent event is that it brought researchers and librarians together to identify immediate opportunities for collaboration. It also showcased examples of Stanford libraries and librarians directly facilitating the research process, from the full-service Stanford Geospatial Center to organizing Software and Data Carpentry workshops (more on this below, and from an earlier post).

Collaboration: Not just a fancy buzzword

The mostly Stanford-based researchers were generous with their time, introducing us to high-level concerns (e.g., why electrons do what they do in condensed matter) as well as more practical matters (e.g., shopping for alternatives to Evernote—yikes—for electronic lab notebooks [ELNs]). They revealed the intimate details of their workflows and data practices (Dr. Audrey Ellerbee admitted that it felt like letting guests into her home to find dirty laundry strewn everywhere, a common anxiety among researchers that in her case was unwarranted), flagged the roadblocks, and presented a constant stream of ideas for building relationships across disciplines and between librarians and researchers.

From the myriad opportunities for library involvement, here are some of the highlights:

A winning model

The final half-day was dedicated to computer science-y issues. Following a trio of presentations involving computational workflows and accompanying challenges (the most common: members of the same research group writing the same pieces of code over and over with scant documentation and zero version control), Tracy Teal (Executive Director of Data Carpentry) and Amy Hodge (Science Data Librarian at Stanford) introduced a winning model for improving everyone’s research lives.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are extremely affordable 2-day workshops that present basic concepts and tools for more effective programming and data handling, respectively. Training materials are openly licensed (CC-BY) and workshops are led by practitioners for practitioners allowing them to be tailored to specific domains (genomics, geosciences, etc.). At present the demand for these (international) workshops exceeds the capacity to meet it … except at Stanford. With local, library-based coordination, Amy has brokered (and in some cases taught) five workshops for individual departments or research groups (who covered the costs themselves). This is the very thing I wished for as a graduate student—muddling through databases and programming in R on my own—and I think it should be replicated at every research institution. Better yet, workshops aren’t restricted to the sciences; Data Carpentry is developing training materials for techniques used in the digital humanities such as text mining.

Learning to live outside of the academic bubble

Another, subtler theme that ran throughout the program was the need/desire to strengthen connections between the academy and industry. Efforts along these lines stand to improve the science underlying matters of public policy (e.g., water management in California) and public health (e.g., new drug development). They also address the mounting pressure placed on researchers to turn knowledge into products. Mark Smith addressed this topic directly during his presentation on ChEM-H: a new Stanford initiative for supporting research across Chemistry, Engineering, and Medicine to understand and advance Human Health. I appreciated that Mark—a medicinal chemist with extensive experience in both sectors—and others emphasized the responsibility to prepare students for jobs in a rapidly shifting landscape with increasing demand for technical skills.

Over the course of SBCW 2015 I met engaged librarians, data managers, researchers, and product managers, including some repeat attendees who raved about the previous two SBCW events; the consensus seemed to be that the third was another smashing success. Helen Josephine (Head of the Engineering Library at Stanford who chaired the organizing committee) is already busy gathering feedback for next year.

SBCW 2015 at Stanford included researchers from:

Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco

ChEM-H Stanford’s lab for Chemistry, Engineering & Medicine for Human Health

Water in the West Institute at Stanford

NSF Engineering Research Center for Re-inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure (ReNUWIt)

DeepDive

Special project topics on Software and Data Carpentry with Physics and BioPhysics faculty and Tracy Teal from Software Carpentry.

Many thanks to:

Helen Josephine, Suzanne Rose Bennett, and the rest of the Local Organizing Committee at Stanford. Sponsored by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine – Pacific Southwest Region, Greater Western Library Alliance, Stanford University Libraries, SPIE, IEEE, Springer Science+Business Media, Annual Reviews, Elsevier.

From Flickr by Paula Fisher (It was just like this, but indoors, with coffee, and powerpoints.)
From Flickr by Paula Fisher (It was just like this, but indoors, with coffee, and powerpoints.)

Data metrics survey results published

Today, we are pleased to announce the publication Making Data Count in Scientific Data. John Kratz and Carly Strasser led the research effort to understand the needs and values of both the researchers who create and use data and of the data managers who preserve and publish it. The Making Data Count project is a collaboration between the CDL, PLOS, and DataONE to define and implement a practical suite of metrics for evaluating the impact of datasets, which is a necessary prerequisite to widespread recognition of datasets as first class scholarly objects.

We started the project with research to understand what metrics would be meaningful to stakeholders and what metrics we can practically collect. We conducted a literature review, focus groups, and– the subject of today’s paper–  a pair of online surveys for researchers and data managers.

In November and December of 2014, 247 researchers and 73 data repository managers answered our questions about data sharing, use, and metrics.Graph of interest in various metrics Survey and anonymized data are available in the Dash repository. These responses told us, among other things, which existing Article Level Metrics (ALMs) might be profitably applied to data:

We have already begun to collect data on the sample project corpus– the entire DataONE collection of 100k+ datasets. Using this pilot corpus, we see preliminary indications of researcher engagement with data across a number of online channels not previously thought to be in use by scholars. The results of this pilot will complement the survey described in today’s paper with real measurement of data-related activities “in the wild.”

For more conclusions and in-depth discussion of the initial research, see the paper, which is open access and available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2015.39. Stay tuned for analysis and results of the DataONE data-level metrics data on the Making Data Count project page: http://lagotto.io/MDC/.