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Building an RDM Guide for Researchers – An (Overdue) Update
It has been a little while since I last wrote about the work we’re doing to develop a research data management (RDM) guide for researchers. Since then, we’ve thought a lot about the goals of this project and settled on a concrete plan for building out our materials. Because we will soon be proactively seeking feedback on the different elements of this project, I wanted to provide an update on what we’re doing and why.
Communication Barriers and Research Data Management
Several weeks ago I wrote about addressing Research Data Management (RDM) as a “wicked problem”, a problem that is difficult to solve because different stakeholders define and address it in different ways. My own experience as a researcher and library postdoc bears this out. Researchers and librarians often think and talk about data in very different ways! But as researchers face changing expectations from funding agencies, academic publishers, their own peers, and other RDM stakeholders about how they should manage and share their data, overcoming such communication barriers becomes increasingly important.
From visualizations like the ubiquitous research data lifecycle to instruments like the Data Curation Profiles, there are a wide variety of excellent tools that can be used to facilitate communication between different RDM stakeholders. Likewise, there are also discipline-specific best practice guidelines and tools like the Research Infrastructure Self Evaluation Framework (RISE) that allow researchers and organizations to assess and advance their RDM activities. What’s missing is a tool that combines these two elements that enables researchers the means to easily self-assess where they are in regards to RDM and allows data service providers to provide easily customizable guidance about how to advance their data-related practices.
Enter our RDM guide for researchers.
Our RDM Guide for Researchers
What I want to emphasize most about our RDM guide is that it is, first and foremost, designed to be a communication tool. The research and library communities both have a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise related to data management. Our guide is not intended to supplant tools developed by either, but to assist in overcoming communication barriers in a way that removes confusion, grows confidence, and helps people in both communities find direction.
While the shape of RDM guide has not changed significantly since my last post, we have refined its basic structure and have begun filling in the details.
The latest iteration of our guide consists of two main elements:
- A RDM rubric which allows researchers to self-assess their data-related practices using language and terminology with which they are familiar.
- A series of one page guides that provide information about how to advance data-related practices as necessary, appropriate, or desired.
The rubric is similar to the “maturity model” described in my earlier blog posts. In this iteration, it consists of a grid containing three columns and a number of rows. The leftmost column contains descriptions of different phases of the research process. At present, the rubric contains four such phases: Planning, Collection, Analysis, and Sharing. These research data lifecycle-esque terms are in place to provide a framing familiar to data service providers in the library and elsewhere.
The next column includes phrases that describe specific research activities using language and terminology familiar to researchers. The language in this column is, in part, derived from the unofficial survey we conducted to understand how researchers describe the research process. By placing these activities beside those drawn from the research data lifecycle, we hope to ground our model in terms that both researchers and RDM service providers can relate to.
The rightmost column then contains a series of declarative statements which a researcher can use to identify their individual practices in terms of the degree to which they are defined, communicated, and forward thinking.
Each element of the rubric is designed to be customizable. We understand that RDM service providers at different institutions may wish to emphasize different services toggled to different parts data lifecycle and that researchers in different disciplines may have different ways of describing their data-related activities. For example, while we are working on refining the language of the declarative statements, I have left them out of the diagram above because they are likely the rubric that will remain most open for customization.
Each row within the rubric will be complemented by a one page guide that will provide researchers with concrete information about data-related best practices. If the purpose of the rubric is to allow researchers to orient themselves in RDM landscape, the purpose of these guides is to help them move forward.
Generating Outputs
Now that we’ve refined the basic structure of our model, it’s time to start creating some outputs. Throughout the remainder of the summer and into the autumn, members of the UC3 team will be meeting regularly to review the content of the first set of one page guides. This process will inform our continual refinement of the RDM rubric which will, in turn, shape the writing of a formal paper.
Moving forward, I hope to workshop this project with as many interested parties as I can, both to receive feedback on what we’ve done so far and to potentially crowdsource some of the content. Over the next few weeks I’ll be soliciting feedback on various aspects of the RDM rubric. If you’d like to provide feedback, please either click through the links below (more to be added in the coming weeks) or contact me directly.
Provide feedback on our guide!
More coming soon!
Disambiguating Dash and Merritt
What’s Dash? What’s Merritt? What’s the difference? After numerous questions about where things should go and what the differences are between our UC3 services, we got the hint that we are not communicating clearly.
Clearing things up
A group of us sat down and talked through different use cases and what wording we were using that was causing such confusion, and have come up with what we hope is a disambiguation of Dash versus Merritt.
Different intentions, different target users
While Dash and Merritt interact with each other at a technical level, they have different intentions and users should not be looking at these two services as a comparison. Dash is optimized for researchers and therefore its user interface, user experience, and metadata schema are optimized for use by individual researchers. Merritt is designed for use by institutional librarians, archivists, and curators.
Because of the different intended purposes, features, and users, UC3 does not recommend that Merritt be advertised to researchers on Research Data Management (RDM) sites or researcher-facing Library Guides.
Below are quick descriptions of each service that should clarify intentions and target users:
- Dash is an open data publication platform for researchers. Self-service depositing of research data through Dash fulfills publisher, funder, and data management plan requirements regarding data sharing and preservation. When researchers publish their datasets through Dash, their datasets are issued a DOI to optimize citability, are publicly available for download and re-use under a CC BY 4.0 or CC-0 license, and are preserved in Merritt, California Digital Library’s preservation repository. Dash is available to researchers at participating UC campuses, as well as researchers in Environmental and Earth Sciences through the DataONE network.
- Merritt is a preservation repository for mediated deposits by UC organizations. We work with staff at UC libraries, archives, and departments to preserve digital assets and collections. Merritt offers bit-level preservation and replication with both public or private access. Merritt is also the preservation repository that preserves Dash-deposited data.
The cost of service vs. the cost of storage
California Digital Library does not charge individual users for the Dash or Merritt services. However, we do recharge your institution for the amount of storage used in Merritt (remember, Dash preserves data in Merritt) on an annual basis. On most campuses, the Library fully subsidizes Dash storage costs, so there is no extra financial obligation to individual researchers depositing data into Dash.
Follow-up
If you have any questions about edge cases or would like to know any more details about the architecture of the Dash platform or Merritt repository, please get in touch at uc3@ucop.edu.
And while you’re here: check out Dash’s new features for uploading large data sets, and uploading directly from the cloud.
Talking About Data: Lessons from Science Communication
As a person who worked for years in psychology and neuroscience laboratories before coming to work in academic libraries, I have particularly strong feelings about ambiguous definitions. One of my favorite anecdotes about my first year of graduate school involves watching two researchers argue about the definition of “attention” for several hours, multiple times a week, for an entire semester. One of the researchers was a clinical psychologist, the other a cognitive psychologist. Though they both devised research projects and wrote papers on the topic of attention, their theories and methods could not have been more different. The communication gap between them was so wide that they were never able to move forward productively. The punchline is that, after sitting through hours of their increasingly abstract and contentious arguments, I would go on to study attention using yet another set of theories and methods as a cognitive neuroscientist. Funny story aside, this anecdote illustrates the degree to which people with different perspectives and levels of expertise can define the same problem in strikingly different ways.
In the decade that has elapsed since those arguments, I have undergone my own change in perspective- from a person who primarily collects and analyzes their own research data to a person who primarily thinks about ways to help other researchers manage and share their data. While my day-to-day activities look rather different, there is one aspect of my work as a library post-doc that is similar to my work as a neuroscientist- many of my colleagues ostensibly working on the same things often have strikingly different definitions, methods, and areas of expertise. Fortunately, I have been able to draw on a body of work that addresses this very thing- science communication.
Wicked Problems
A “wicked problem” is a problem that is extremely difficult to solve because different stakeholders define and address it in different ways. In my anecdote about argumentative professors, understanding attention can be considered a wicked problem. Without getting too much into the weeds, the clinical psychologist understood attention mostly in the context of diagnoses like Attention Deficit Disorder, while the cognitive psychologist understood it the context of scanning visual environments for particular elements or features. As a cognitive neuroscientist, I came to understand it mostly in terms of its effects within neural networks as measured by brain imaging methods like fMRI.
Research data management (RDM) has been described as a wicked problem. A data service provider in an academic library may define RDM as “the documentation, curation, and preservation of research data”, while a researcher may define RDM as either simply part of their daily work or, in the case of something like a data management plan written for a grant proposal, as an extra burden placed upon such work. Other RDM stakeholders, including those affiliated with IT, research support, and university administration, may define it in yet other ways.
Science communication is chock full of wicked problems, including concepts like climate change and the use of stem cell use. Actually, given the significant amount of scholarship devoted to defining terms like “scientific literacy” and the multitudes of things that the term describes, science communication may itself be a wicked problem.
What is Scientific Communication?
Like attention and RDM, it is difficult to give a comprehensive definition of science communication. Documentaries like “Cosmos” are probably the most visible examples, but science communication actually comes in a wide variety of forms including science journalism, initiatives aimed at science outreach and advocacy, and science art. What these activities have in common is that they all generally aim to help people make informed decisions in a world dominated by science and technology. In parallel, there is also a burgeoning body of scholarship devoted to the science of science communication which, among other things, examines how effective different communication strategies are for changing people’s perceptions and behaviors around scientific topics.
For decades, the prevailing theory in science communication was the “Deficit Model”, which posits that scientific illiteracy is due to a simple lack of information. In the deficit model, skepticism about topics such as climate change are assumed to be due to a lack of comprehension of the science behind them. Thus, at least according to the deficit model, the “solution” to the problem of science communication is as straightforward as providing people with all the facts. In this conception, the audience is generally assumed to be homogeneous and communication is assumed to be one way (from scientists to the general public).
Though the deficit model persists, study after study (after meta-analysis) has shown that merely providing people with facts about a scientific topic does not cause them to change their perceptions or behaviors related to that topic. Instead, it turns out that presenting facts that conflict with a person’s worldview can actually cause them to double down on that worldview. Also, audiences are not homogenous. Putting aside differences in political and social worldviews, people have very different levels of scientific knowledge and relate to that knowledge in very different ways. For this reason, more modern models of science communication focus not on one-way transmissions of information but on fostering active engagement, re-framing debates, and meeting people where they are. For example, one of the more effective strategies for getting people to pay attention to climate change is not to present them with a litany of (dramatic and terrifying) facts, but to link it to their everyday emotions and concerns.
Communicating About Data
If we adapt John Durant’s nicely succinct definition of science literacy,“What the general public ought to know about science.” to an RDM context, the result is something like “What researcher’s out to know about handling data.” Thus, data services in academic libraries can be said to be a form of science communication. As with “traditional” science communicators, data service providers interact with audiences possessing different perspectives and levels of knowledge as their own. The major difference, of course, being that the audience for data service providers is specifically the research community.
There is converging evidence that many of the current plans for fostering better RDM have led to mixed results. Recent studies of NSF data management plans have revealed a significant amount of variability in terms of the degree to which researchers address data management-related concepts like metadata, data sharing, and long-term preservation. The audience of data service providers is, like those of more “traditional science communicators, quite heterogeneous, so perhaps adopting methods from the repertoire of science communication could help foster more active engagement and the adoption of better practices. Many libraries and data service providers have already adopted some of these methods, perhaps without realizing their application in other domains. But I also don’t mean to criticize any existing efforts to engage researchers on the topic of RDM. If I’ve learned one thing from doing different forms of science communication over the years, it is that outreach is difficult and change is slow.
In a series of upcoming blog posts, I’ll write about some of my current projects that incorporate what I’ve written here. First up: I’ll provide an update of the RDM Maturity Model project that I previously described here and here. Coming soon!