A talk at #fote13 (fote-conference.com) about why we should *all* - as taxpayers - care about reuse of research data

1. Research data: burden or treasure?
Kevin Ashley
Digital Curation Centre
www.dcc.ac.uk
@kevingashley
Kevin.ashley@ed.ac.uk
Reusable with attribution: CC-BY
The DCC is supported by Jisc & FP7

2. 164 universities in UK*
*2011 HESA data
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71 (43%) > 5% research income
115 (70%) > £1m income from research

3. £4.4 billion total
research grants
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4. Funders are making demands
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http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/Pages/expectations.aspx
EPSRC expects all those institutions it funds
to develop a roadmap that aligns … with
EPSRC’s expectations by 1st May 2012;
to be fully compliant … by 1st May 2015.

6. 2012-06-15
Kevin Ashley, DCC; IRWM12,
ULCC; CC-BY
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• Awareness of regulatory environment
• Data access statement
• Policies and processes
• Data storage
• Structured metadata descriptions
• DOIs for data
• Securely preserved for a minimum of 10 years
from last use

7. How much data do we have?
• Edinburgh – provision for 5 Petabytes
• Oxford – guessing 3Pb/year
• For comparison – LHC @ CERN – 15 Pb/year
• £2m investment in storage not unusual
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8. The Data Deluge is upon us
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Sensor’s ability
to produce data
outstrips IT’s
ability to
process it

9. Research Data Centres – the solution!
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MANY AREAS OF
RESEARCH HAVE NO
DATA CENTRE TO
SERVE THEM

10. Cloud – sorted!
• Sorry, but it isn’t.
• See David Rosenthal’s analysis of the
economics of Amazon for preservation
“Distributed digital preservation in the cloud”
IJDC 8(1), 2013 doi:10.2218/ijdc.v8i1.248
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11. Cost of data for 100 years – local vs Amazon S3
Data from blog.dshr.org/2013/01/talk-at-idcc2013.html
© David Rosenthal, used under CC-BY-SA licence
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12. Cost of data for 100 years – local vs Amazon S3 AND Glacier
Data from blog.dshr.org/2013/01/talk-at-idcc2013.html
© David Rosenthal, used under CC-BY-SA licence
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13. That looks like a problem
• Funder requirements exist for a reason:
– That data is valuable
• Value to funder, society from reuse
• Value to the institution is there also
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BIS business case: £1.5m investment in research data
services pays back 2.5 times after 5 years

14. Integrity
• Not everyone publishes
here
• Almost all fraud
connected to
unavailable data
• People suffer & die due
to research fraud
• When your research is
reproducible – it gets
cited
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15. Citability
• Making data available increases citations
• Everyone – academic, funder, institution –
loves citations
• Want evidence?
– Alter, Pienta, Lyle – 240%, social sciences *
– Piwowar, Vision – 9% (microarray data)†
– Henneken, Accomazzi – 20% (astronomy) #
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† Piwowar H, Vision TJ. (2013) Data reuse & the open data citation advantage. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e1v1
http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1v1
* Amy Pienta, George Alter, Jared Lyle, (2010) The Enduring Value of Social Science Research: The Use and Reuse of Primary Research Data.
http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/78307
# Edwin Henneken, Alberto Accomazzi, (2011) Linking to Data - Effect on Citation Rates in Astronomy. http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3618

16. Value in the institution
• New research depends on the old – well
managed data resources like well-equipped
labs
• Teaching more effective when real data from
research is used
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17. Wherever it is, it has valueWant a 400% -> 1200%
return on your
investment?
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Try BADC!
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_directions/strategicdirections/badc.aspx

18. Commercial services
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19. Can we find it?
• Data must be discoverable to be reused
• Alone, or in conjunction with publication
• Institutional catalogues, national data
registries – JISC is piloting through DCC
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22. Jisc – through DCC – can help
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23. http://dataintelligence.3tu.nl/en/home/
Choice of RDM training
materials for librarians
Up-skilling
for data
http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/libtraining.html
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Idea
Develop
Fund
Plan
Record
Process
Publish
Read

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Idea
Develop
Fund
Plan
Record
Process
Publish
Read
Idea
Develop
Fund
Plan
Record
Process
Publish
Read

26. Idea
Develop
Fund
Plan
Record
Process
Publish
Read
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27. Data reuse stories
• The palaeontologist who saved years of work
with archaeological data
• The ‘noise’ from research radar that mapped
dust from Eyjafjallajökull
• The 19th-century logs and photographs that
help us model climate change
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Often your data tells
stories that your
publications do not

28. 3TU treasure chest
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29. Thanks for your attention
kevin.ashley@ed.ac.uk
www.dcc.ac.uk
@kevingashley
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30. DCC ‘institutional engagement’
Assess
needs
Make the case
Develop
support and
services
RDM policy
development
Customised Data
Management Plans
DAF & CARDIO
assessments
Guidance and
training
Workflow
assessment
DCC
support
team
Advocacy with senior
management
Institutional
data catalogues
Pilot RDM
tools
…and support policy implementation
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