Planning and managing your

research project

Dr Eddy Verbaan

Research Data Manager

e.verbaan@shu.ac.uk

(0114) 225 38 52

Open research

• Transition period

• From toll access to publications and undisclosed research data

• To free access for all to publications and research data

• Affects researchers, publishers and many others

• Open access to publications

• Research data management including open access to research data

Your thesis Your data

Research Archive

(SHURA)

Research Data

Archive

(SHURDA)

Adsetts

Library

http://shura.shu.ac.uk http://shurda.shu.ac.uk

Your project

Planning

• Year 1

• Planning how you will

gather, archive and

share your data

Executing

• Year 2 and 3

• Gathering and

analysing data

• with archiving

and sharing in

mind

• Writing up

• with publishing

your thesis

online in mind

Closing

• Year 3

• Archiving and

sharing the

underpinning and

any other data

(SHURDA)

• Making your thesis

open access

(SHURA)

Before research During research After research

Session outline

1. Open access (OA)

– What is open access?

– Copyright and your electronic thesis

2. Research data management (RDM)

– What is research data management?

– Research data management at SHU

1. OPEN ACCESS AND

ELECTRONIC THESES

What is Open Access?

• Open Access means access that is – online

– free of charge (no access restrictions)

– free of most copyright and licensing restrictions

• Authors do not relinquish their copyright, but attach a licence to their work that usually requires attribution of the author through proper citation

• You would normally be able to download the work, copy it, distribute it, print it, search it, pass it as data through software, etc

• Open access is relevant for all formats, such as peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and doctoral theses

The problem

• A global movement that started around 2002 to address problems with commercial "toll access" publishing models

• Above inflation price rises for journal subscriptions but stagnant library budgets mean access to relevant literature is increasingly limited – price rises are on average four times inflation, 7.3% per annum

at SHU

• An increase in published literature means academics can access a decreasing percentage of available literature – published literature increases exponentially with 5% per annum

• The only sustainable model is removing the cost of access to literature by changing publishers' business models

Open access types

Green open access

(Self archiving)

Authors publish in the normal

way and then deposit a

version of their work for free

public use in their institutional

repository. Often the

research is only publicly

available after an embargo

period.

Gold open access

Authors publish in a fully

open access or hybrid journal

that provides immediate open

access (often involves

payment of a fee)

Electronic theses in the UK

• Most universities in the UK require submission of an electronic version of a thesis

• Published in an institutional online repository

• SHU Research Archive (SHURA), http://shura.shu.ac.uk

• The thesis will then also be available via EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) from the British Library

• National repository for UK doctoral theses, http://ethos.bl.uk

• Over 400,000 records from over 120 institutions

• About 1/3 have full text PDF available for download via

– EThOS

– a link to an institutional repository

• You can also order scanned copies of older theses

Your thesis Your data

Research Archive

(SHURA)

Research Data

Archive

(SHURDA)

EThOS

Adsetts

Library

Activity

• What are the benefits of making your

thesis available via open access?

• Can you think of any downsides?

Benefits of electronic theses

• Global audience: you can disseminate your research

widely with minimal effort

• Reputation: you may get citations

• Opportunities: further publications, funding opportunities,

collaborations

• You may need an embargo – commercially sensitive information about a company or sponsor that

should remain confidential

– the thesis contains references to individuals which have not been

anonymised

– you have an agreement with a publisher that prohibits prior publication

What is copyright?

• Authors automatically have copyright in anything they write or create, they do not need to apply for it or use the copyright mark ©

• This includes all materials you find on the Internet

• In Europe copyright lasts until 70 years after the end of the calendar year in which the last surviving author dies

• Authors can assign parts of their copyright to others, eg a publisher (this is common)

• Copyright includes the right to – copy the work

– issue copies to the public

– perform, show or play the work

– broadcast the work

– adapt the work

– rent or lend the work

• If you want to do any of these things, you will need permission from the copyright holder

• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988)

Copyright and your

electronic thesis • If you want to include any 'substantial' third party items in your

electronic thesis, you have to make sure you are allowed to do so, and if not, ask permission

• 'Substantial' depends on the significance of the part in the whole item (eg recommendations and conclusions even if less than a page from an 80 page report)

• https://library.shu.ac.uk/lms/freebooks/shucopyrightelectronicthesis.pdf

Examples of substantial third party items

long extracts of text from works by other people

illustrations, photographs and images

figures or tables

maps and charts, even those you have redrawn yourself

materials of your own that have been previously published

Keep track of third party materials

• Keep track of all substantial

third party items that you use,

such as images, tables and

maps

• Make sure you know where

you found the items, how to

attribute them, who the

copyright holder is, and what

you are allowed to do with

them (eg licenses)

• Seek permission via email or

letter to include these items in

your electronic thesis as soon

as you realise that you need to

– Copyright holders may take a long

time to respond!

• Keep any responses, they

need to be included when you

submit your electronic thesis

2. RESEARCH DATA

MANAGEMENT

Research Data Management

• Long-term curation of digital resources

• Principles of open access applied not just to outputs but to the underlying resources or datasets which should be made freely available for the purpose of: • scrutiny of research outputs

• re-use in new research projects

• Making data available to others requires careful planning and management of these resources during the research project

• Mandate from funders and journals since 2011 + good research practice

Research Data Management

Planning

• Including ethics

and copyright

Managing

• Documenting and

organising data

• Storing and

backing up data

Archiving &

Sharing

• Selecting which

data to keep

• Preserving data

• Giving access to

data

Before research During research After research

Re-use

Good research practice

• Direct benefits of managing live data

– Storing and backing up: avoiding the risk of data loss and

unauthorised access

– Documenting: usability of resources through documentation

– Organising: efficiency through logical folder structures, file

naming conventions, file versioning

• Data archiving and sharing

– Research integrity: openness and transparency

– Personal and institutional reputation: increase in citation rate of

associated research output of up to 69%, opportunities to

collaborate

– Altruistic benefit: combining datasets in new ways, may create

new insights and advance academic progress

Good research practice

• Planning – Decisions made at the beginning determine what

you can do with your data later on

– informed consent should allow for data sharing at the end of your project

– re-using secondary data may have certain restrictions to what you can do with that data

• "It took me a while to get my data into suitable formats. I’ve learnt a lesson for future work: think SHURDA from day one!"

Data sharing and management

snafu in 3 short acts

Video produced by New York University: https://youtu.be/N2zK3sAtr-4

Activity

• What are the three most important things

you have learned about research data

management from this video?

This is what I came up with

• ways of sharing

• documenting your data

• file format obsolescence

Drivers

The data deluge

Data security

Research integrity

Open access

The data deluge

• The amount of data grows exponentially

– in the STEM fields 30% annually

• Sciences: sensor networks, satellites,

seismographs, simulations and computational

models, etc.

• Social sciences: government statistics, online

surveys, etc.

• Humanities: large bodies of text, distant

reading, digital images and video, models of

historic sites

• Problems of scale: metadata (discovery,

usability) and preservation (storage medium, file

format)

• The Library of Alexandria revisited: Vint Cerf

(vice-president of Google) warns for a digital

Dark Age

Data security

• Unwanted loss • 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of

data loss in any given year (hard disk

crashes)

• 31% of PC users have lost all their files

due to events beyond their control

• 2005: fire at the University of

Southampton causes significant data

loss - not all data were backed up, and

not all data could be recovered from

the 70 damaged hard drives with the

most critical data

• loosing your portable device with all

your work on it

• Unauthorised access • e.g. loosing a portable device with

personal and sensitive personal

information relating to the Data

Protection Act (1998)

Research integrity: openness and

transparency in a crisis of trust

• Recent cases of misconduct, e.g. in

social psychology

– Diederik Stapel (falsifying data for

dozens of papers) in 2011

– Dirk Smeesters (massaging data to

strengthen outcomes in his papers) in

2012

Crisis of trust: failure of replication

• The Reproducibility Project in psychology involved 270 academics replicating findings of 100 papers published in top peer-reviewed journals in 2008 - the findings were published in Science in September 2015

• Only 36 out of 100 papers could be replicated

• The measured effect was on average only half from the original publication

• Similar studies with similar outcomes for other disciplines

Crisis of trust: questionable

practices • Survey under

psychologists (John et al. 2012) shows that – 0.6% of psychologists

surveyed admitted to falsifying data

– 22% round off p-values to get significance (if you get a result of 0.054 you round to 0.05 to get significance)

– 38.2% said that they decided whether to exclude data after looking at the effect of doing so

Reponses to the crisis of trust

• Articles get retracted (http://retractionwatch.com): May 2012 review of 2,047 retracted articles concluded that:

• 21.3% were retracted because of errors

• 67.4% were retracted because of scientific misconduct

– fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%)

– duplicate publication (14.2%)

– plagiarism (9.8%)

• Many journals now encourage transparency through data publication (Nature since 2013)

Open Access and funder

requirements • Since 2011, an increasing

number of research funders

have requirements for

publishing open access

• Improves the impact of

research

• "Publicly funded research data

are a public good, produced in

the public interest, and should

be made openly available"

• Funders usually expect:

• Timely release of data

– on publication, or soon after

data generation, or project end

• Data sharing

– as open as possible

– with a data availability

statement in research papers

• Preservation of data

– typically 10+ years if the data

are of long-term value

As open as possible: open data vs

open access • Different objects, different demands

• Open access publications are free to use by anyone but there

may be necessary restrictions to openness of data (RCUK

Common Principles on Data Policy):

– data may be subject to various legal, ethical and contractual

restrictions

– data producers should have the right of first exploration of those

data

• Dimensions of openness:

– what materials are made available (a selection of your data)

– when they are made available (when research outputs are

published, when research project finishes, with an embargo period)

– to whom they are available (unrestricted access versus controlled

access to bona fide researchers for a specific purpose)

– on what terms and conditions they are available

RESEARCH DATA

MANAGEMENT AT SHU

SHU RDM Policy

• SHU's Research Data Management Policy: – draft a data management plan before the project commences

– store all active research data on the University networked storage system

– make arrangements for the long-term preservation of datasets that underpin a publication, are of potential long-term value, and/or support a patent application

– register all preserved datasets in the University's Research Data Repository

– share datasets where this is required by any funders or where it will be beneficial for the research community

– include a statement in any publication on how to access the supporting data

– formally cite any third party data that you use

• Mandatory for all publicly-funded research, good practice for all other research

• Responsibility lies with the Director of Studies: “It is their duty to ensure that all members of the research team with access to the research data adhere to good research data management practice.”

Planning

• Data Management

Planning Tool

online tool for planning

research data, also as pdf

http://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk;

http://research.shu.ac.uk/

rdm/dmp.html#pgr

Managing

• Research Store

(Q:\Research)

safe and secure storage of

'live' research data

http://research.shu.ac.uk/

rdm/research-store.html

Archiving &

Sharing • SHU Research

Data Archive

(SHURDA)

archive for digital and

non-digital research data

http://shurda.shu.ac.uk

Before research During research After research

Support

Guidance website, http://research.shu.ac.uk/rdm

Advisory service, rdm@shu.ac.uk

Events (training, workshops, drop-ins)

Your thesis Your data

Research Archive

(SHURA)

Research Data

Archive

(SHURDA)

EThOS

Adsetts

Library

Activity

• What are the advantages and dangers of the following storage options? – Networked drives

– Local drives on PCs and laptops

– Cloud-based storage

– External portable storage

• What would be the best way to back up?

Research store (Q:\Research)

• Places to store your data: – Local drives on PCs and laptops (risk of data corruption, data loss, unauthorised access if

unencrypted)

– Cloud-based storage (host has access to all of your data, they may have the right to

use/publish your information)

– External portable storage (risk of data corruption, data loss, unauthorised access if

unencrypted)

• The Q:\Research drive is a networked storage facility which is – secure (firewalls, passwords)

– safe (daily automatic backup on two remote

locations)

– flexible (enough space, flexible access arrangements)

• Ask your supervisor for your own space on the

Research Store (Q:\Research drive).

• More info at http://research.shu.ac.uk/rdm/research-store.html

Backing up

• Back up regularly, preferably daily

• Use the 3-2-1- rule:

– (3) Keep 3 copies of important files (a primary

and two backups)

– (2) on 2 different media types (such as CDs,

hard drives, memory sticks and online

storage)

– (1) with 1 copy being stored offsite (or offline)

Support

Online self-help

• Portal, http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/rdm.html

– links to policy, guidance, and SHURDA

• Very informative guidance website, http://research.shu.ac.uk/rdm/

• Online learning module on Blackboard/shuspace as part of the Academic CPD Online Courses

– 30-60 minutes

Personal advice

• Advisory service, http://research.shu.ac.uk/rdm/advisory-service.html, rdm@shu.ac.uk

– data management planning

– depositing data

– any other queries

Events

• Workshops on planning and on archiving research data

• Monthly drop-in sessions on both campuses

• http://research.shu.ac.uk/rdm/events.html

Activity

• You will make your thesis available via SHURA and your data via SHURDA as open access at the end of your doctoral project

• This has consequences for how you manage third party materials that you wish to include in your thesis and how you plan and manage your data

• What are you going to do next? Write down three things and discuss with your neighbour(s).

To do

• Do the online Blackboard module on research data management

• Talk to your supervisor about research data management

• If you have an external sponsor (eg English Institute of Sport) find out what their policies on open access and research data are

• Start thinking about ethics and copyright of your data as soon as you have made decisions about the data for your doctoral thesis

• Write a data management plan towards the end of year 1

• Ask your supervisor for a folder on the Research Store before you start working with data

• Make good note of any third party materials that you use