There is consensus across the research community: research data matters. This position has been recently reinforced by federal funding agencies: In January 2023, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will begin requiring most of the 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions it funds annually to include a data-management plan in their grant applications and to make their data publicly available. The release of the most recent OSTP Public Access Policy memo in August 2022 further emphasized the importance of data management and sharing for all sponsored research.This new federal guidance has accelerated the need for institutions, libraries, and vendors to work together to build robust RDM support communities not only on their campuses, but also across the wider research ecosystem. In this panel, an industry expert will moderate an interactive discussion with data management librarians about how community-building and partnerships can begin to address institutional RDM needs and challenges. Topics covered will include:

• Collaborating across campus: panelists will share their approaches and lessons learned for working with multiple stakeholders across their campuses
• Learning together: panelists will discuss community-led initiatives they are engaged in: the Ithaka S&R Coordinating Research Data Support Services study, the InvenioRDM project, and the Research Data Management Librarian Academy
• Service gaps: panelists will discuss where there are still service gaps that need to be addressed - as well as some of the challenges around closing those gaps

Workshop presented at the Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP) Virtual Summit 2023 on March 27, 2023. 

Summary: The NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), led by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy, launched in 2022 with the goal of bringing together 7 generalist repositories to collaborate on enhancing support for NIH data sharing use cases including implementing common metrics and metadata, “coopetition”, and collaborative training and outreach. This workshop will present the GREI mission and goals and introduce the 7 generalist repositories participating in GREI and their common and unique features (Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, OSF, Vivli, Zenodo), offer hands-on training and guidance on supporting researchers in using generalist repositories for data sharing including listing generalist repositories as part of data management and sharing plans, use cases supported by specific generalist repositories, and recommended practices for data sharing in generalist repositories. The session will also provide guidance on searching for data across generalist repositories and tracking open data impact and compliance with funder policies. Importantly, this session will also be an opportunity for GREI to gather feedback from the data librarian community on the needs and use cases for generalist repositories to inform future GREI work.

Librarians work with academic departments, research labs, information technology units, and other communities to provide data services. Once you have a partner, how can you coordinate services to help them develop research data practices that best serve their domain?

Coordinating services creates opportunities to implement domain-specific practices. Bringing together your library, archives, research computing, and academic departments enable solutions to challenges in the organization, sharing, and reproducibility of research data.

You’ll learn lessons from one medical school’s coordinated domain-specific research data management solutions that you can apply in your setting. You’ll see, for example, how a lab’s move to an electronic lab notebook platform required coordinated efforts among the academic department, tech support, and the library.

You’ll explore service examples, identify scientific research data challenges, and leave with checklists you can tailor to your community.

Data management is essential for responsible research and planning should be early. Well-organized and well-documented data will meet the requirements of funding agencies and institutions and help the research to be preserved, discovered, and reproducible. In this webinar Julie Goldman (BS, MLIS) Countway Research Data Services Librarian with the Harvard Library, shared with us essential practices for the management of scientific and technical data, commented on international good practices and new working models in Open Science as tools for management and knowledge sharing.

Webinar Recording

This short talk will build on the concepts that were previously discussed during Part One: Labor and Capacity for Research Data Management. New opportunities for engagement in data-intensive research provoke qualitative changes to service and staffing models. In order for the academic library to provide high quality, campus-level support in data science with in-depth consultation services that require considerable time and expertise, the library must identify partners and foster skilled personnel. This presentation will provide tools and training examples, management challenges and opportunities for collaboration in supporting data science through the library and across institutions.

In response to the COVID19 pandemic, Countway Library services moved online. In April, we started weekly webinars to engage Harvard community members with data management. Over three months, over 550 people tuned in for a live session! We decided to continue webinars during the summer, and the “Great Data Cleanup Campaign” was created to support the community to go back to the basics while continuing to work at home, or revamp their skills when returning to the lab. This presentation will explore how these weekly data management online sessions have benefited participants across the university (and even internationally) during the work at home environment.

Sharing data is now encouraged by major funding agencies, and many journals require it as a prerequisite for publication. While many of the hard science journals have implemented ‘Data Deposit Requirements’ and ‘Policies’, in the Library Science literature, publishers are beginning to move titles into open access journals, but data deposit requirements are just beginning to be addressed. Librarian authors will increasingly find themselves having to comply with data sharing policies. In this webinar, we look at examples from the Journal of the Medical Library Association and the Journal of eScience Librarianship and discuss best practices in data deposit.

This presentation discussed the development of the New England Software Carpentry Library Consortium (NESCLiC), a member organization of the Carpentries. The Carpentries is a non-profit organization and international community of volunteers that develops lessons, trains instructors, and organizes workshops in data management and software development best practices for and by researchers and librarians across disciplines.

How can librarians demonstrate their relevance in the changing landscape of new software and research skills? Get involved in "The Carpentries" by teaching software code and improving researcher's data toolkits! The Carpentries (Software, Data and Library) can serve as a core programmatic element for libraries to invest in.

The New England Software Carpentry Library Consortium, or NESCLiC for short, has brought together library staff from nine academic libraries: Yale, Harvard, Tufts, Dartmouth, UMass Amherst, UMass Medical, UConn, Brown, and Mt. Holyoke.

NESCLiC shares the costs and benefits that go along with Gold Tier membership, but the Consortium also allows staff from the different areas of academic librarianship and technology, including the digital humanities, statistics, high performance computing, sciences, engineering, medical libraries, and data services, to work together on Carpentries initiatives in their libraries.

The group's goal was to create a network of Carpentries instructors in New England, to share instruction, and ultimately, to develop new lesson material. Sharing the membership between the nine libraries allowed NESCLiC members to pilot the Carpentries approach together, rather than separately, and to lower the costs for each institution.

Members of NESCLiC have served as hosts, instructors, and helpers in nine workshops across New England, reaching librarians and scholars at: Tufts, Dartmouth, Yale, SCSU, Berklee School of Music and Brown. Moving forward, NESCLiC plans to extend their membership to other academic institutions and help onboard additional certified instructors.

Learn how the instructors are staying involved in this consortium, building their own carpentry skills, giving back to their communities, and collaborating around New England (and beyond)!

The surge in interest in data science is fueling demands for support in several dimensions of data-intensive research. Academic libraries are poised to capitalize on these opportunities, but require consideration of accompanying challenges, including resource management, inclusive programming, and recruitment and retention of library talent.

In this session, Julie Goldman and Patti Condon discuss research data management as a key component of research integrity and offer effective options for addressing challenges faced by administers and researchers. Data management involves establishing and implementing strategies for the responsible and sustainable collection, handling, sharing, re-use, secure storage, and long-term access of data. However, we face inherit challenges managing data in a digital and networked environment, for example, technological obsolescence, the quantity of data generated, data sharing and discoverability, and skills development. We are also confronted with external pressures such as mandates from federal funding agencies requiring evidence of sound data management practices and emphasizing the dissemination of data.

 

Through a combination of presentation, discussion, and interactive participation, this workshop addresses the various roles and opportunities of stakeholder when navigating the complex landscape of data management. At the conclusion of this session, participants will be more familiar with challenges associated with the management of data for their communities and approaches to addressing responsible conduct in data management in ways that are most meaningful and useful to the researchers they support.

This panel presentation highlights groups who are coordinating efforts to provide services, resources and support in the area of Research Data Management. 

OBJECTIVE: The Harvard Library has a decentralized organizational structure serving a wide breadth of disciplines. This model allows librarians to build close relationships with research communities, but it presents challenges to systematically connect researchers to expertise necessary to support their data needs. In order to formalize a more integrated strategy, Harvard Library is developing a strategic plan for providing data services.

METHODS: The Harvard Library Research Data Management Program connects community members to services and resources spanning the research data lifecycle, to help ensure multi-disciplinary research data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. HL-supported data librarians embedded at the school or department level provide direct-to-patron services. The program also provides program-to-unit services which include a directory of services and community events. In addition, the Harvard Medical School Data Management Working Group includes a variety of representatives. The group endeavors to help create solutions, provide guidance, and develop standards and best practices to meet unmet needs and anticipate future needs of biomedical researchers. Coordination must happen in conjunction with the HMS DMWG, and be transparent to the entire Harvard Library system. It is the goal of a strategic plan to outline Countway Library data services in a systematic, rather than ad hoc, fashion.

RESULTS: Four strategic priorities identified:
Service/Collections: support DMPTool; advocate appropriate repositories; support ORCID adoption; provide consultations; re-think library space to support research.
Outreach/Resources: website with resources and guidance; RDM lectures; provide software and tools necessary for biomedical research; collaborate with local and national partners to foster best practices; identify strategies for promotion of services.
Education/Training: collaborate with others to provide training; offer specialized bioinformatics training; equip librarians with the skills necessary to provide data services.
Assessment/Impact: tie in data services assessment to the library-wide program; explore user feedback methods; gather analytics and implement user feedback tools.

CONCLUSIONS: The ultimate goal is to improve communication between the disparate groups on campus, as well as promote the Library’s services as the same. Working with a variety of entities will help guide Harvard Library to foster strong collaborations with diverse partners. With guidance from this strategic plan, the library will look to emerging trends and determine tools and knowledge necessary to implement new services.

This workshop provides an overview of qualitative user experience (UX) research types and when to implement each method to gain user perspective and feedback. A lesson plan and resources may be used to conduct your own workshops.

Online learning is incredibly important for libraries and librarians to stay valuable in modern information ages. Some advantages of online learning include lower costs, convenience and flexibility, wide audience, and variety of programs and courses. Recently, there have been many funded projects to develop online training for research data management (National Institutes of Health Big Data to Knowledge Initiative and National Libraries of Medicine Biomedical and Health Research Data Management).

NLM Director Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, said, “We need data-sophisticated librarians who can assist the research process, the enterprise, in developing the resources and data services around them.” While librarians play a key role in the research environment, providing training to a broad audience will help foster a community of data savvy scientists, researchers and clinicians.

Through cross institutional-partnerships, Countway Library of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School developed The Best Practices for Biomedical Research Data Management Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which officially launched January 8th, 2018. This course facilitates self-paced learning of concepts, approaches and best practices in data management.

Walk through the project timeline and explore current assessment of this new course:

1. Project Development: Responding to local and national research data directives.
2. Selected Modules: Assessing already existing curricula and resources.
3. Regional Instructors: Collaboration across varying institutions and professionals
4. Online Platforms: How do you identify the correct software for you and the project?
5. Usability Testing: Gather feedback on the technology and course content.
6. Focus Groups: What do students want or value in an online course?
7. Demographics: Where are students taking this course?
8. Assessment: We can compare pre- and post-quizzes. How are students performing?

Libraries are constantly re-framing their services to respond to shifts in community needs. This case study explores the evolution of the library published Journal of eScience Librarianship, as it evolves to continue to serve librarians faced with the many challenges of a data-driven environment. The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) is published by the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. JeSLIB is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that explores the role of librarians in supporting scientific research through services such as research data management, data literacy, data curation, data sharing, and librarians embedded on research teams. Launched in 2012 with funding from the National Library of Medicine, this new journal focused on the development of eScience librarianship as a discipline, while also promoting open access and the transformation in scholarly communication. At the time, JeSLIB was at the forefront of thinking about the “library as scholarly publisher” and also sought to fill a need for librarians to learn about new challenges related to scientific research and the data deluge. The journal emerged as an outgrowth of numerous eScience outreach projects and conference meetings that took place in New England among science and health sciences librarians, and continues now as a global effort with Editorial Board members from around the country, and a global readership.

Since 2012, the Journal of eScience Librarianship has published 77 articles, including three video articles, and has 72,372 downloads (both as of December 1, 2016). JeSLIB uses Altmetrics to track where readers are sharing articles to, and both downloads and Altmetric scores are displayed for each article in the journal. JeSLIB is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The journal’s team of librarian editors has acquired new skills and expertise in all facets of scholarly publishing -- as practitioners rather than as observers -- to the benefit of the library. Running a publishing program can serve as a critical tool to help librarians cultivate new partnerships and roles, and to engage with faculty, researchers and students who want to venture into publishing in emerging or under-served disciplines. Now in its fourth year, JeSLIB is proactively responding to shifts in community needs. While the journal sought to explore the many roles of librarians in supporting eScience, it has become evident that the journal must rework its scope to include newer developments within data science. In thinking about reframing the journal to remain relevant and current, the editors recently conducted an extensive review and revision of the journal’s policies as well as updating the journal’s website to include novel information and content.

Looking to the future, the Journal of eScience Librarianship is planning more special issues on emerging areas, submitting the journal to indexing and abstracting services, and is also surveying the implementation of open peer review. With current efforts supporting open access of research, and use of alternative metrics, as well as future initiatives for rethinking scholarly publishing (open peer review and library as publisher), JeSLIB is evolving to continue to serve librarians faced with the many challenges of a data-driven environment.

This case study explores the evolution of the library published Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB), as it evolves to continue to serve librarians faced with the many challenges of a data driven environment. JeSLIB is an open access, peer-reviewed journal published by the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The library publishes JeSLIB through its eScholarship@UMMS repository on the bepress Digital Commons platform.

JeSLIB was at the forefront of thinking about the “library as scholarly publisher” and sought to fill a need for librarians to learn about new challenges related to scientific research data. The journal provides mechanisms for authors to confidently share their work under an appropriately selected Creative Commons license. JeSLIB is also committed to spreading the scholarly work of the profession, and uses Altmetrics to track where readers are sharing articles to. Additionally, the adoption of social media platforms, including YouTube and Twitter, has allowed the journal to interact with readers and authors in new ways.

The journal’s team of librarian editors has acquired new skills and expertise in all facets of scholarly publishing to the benefit of the library. Running a publishing program can serve as a critical tool to help librarians cultivate new partnerships and roles.

Since starting the journal five years ago, the editorial team has reworked its scope to include newer developments within data science. In thinking about reframing the journal to remain relevant and current, the editors recently conducted an extensive review and revision of the journal’s policies as well as updating the journal’s website.

Through this presentation, the editors will share their experiences supporting open access of research, rethinking scholarly publishing, and advancing scientific communication.

This case study explores the evolution of the library published Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB), as it evolves to continue to serve librarians faced with the many challenges of a data driven environment. JeSLIB is an open access, peer-reviewed journal published by the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The library publishes JeSLIB through its eScholarship@UMMS repository on the bepress Digital Commons platform.

JeSLIB was at the forefront of thinking about the “library as scholarly publisher” and sought to fill a need for librarians to learn about new challenges related to scientific research data. The journal’s team of librarian editors has acquired new skills and expertise in all facets of scholarly publishing to the benefit of the library. Running a publishing program can serve as a critical tool to help librarians cultivate new partnerships and roles.

In response to the changing scholarly communication landscape and developments in open access publishing, the Journal of eScience Librarianship must react accordingly in order to remain relevant. JeSLIB is proactively responding to shifts in community needs including reworking its scope, updating journal policies, acknowledging peer-reviewers, and changing the default Creative Commons Licensing terms.

Through this presentation, the editors will share their experiences supporting open access of research, rethinking scholarly publishing, and advancing scientific communication.

With funding from the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative for Resource Development, Countway Library of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School is developing The Best Practices for Biomedical Research Data Management Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). This course provides training to librarians, biomedical researchers, undergraduate and graduate biomedical students, and other interested individuals on recommended practices facilitating the discoverability, access, integrity, reuse value, privacy, security, and long term preservation of biomedical research data. Each of the nine modules is dedicated to a specific component of data management best practices and includes video lectures, presentation slides, research teaching cases, readings, activities, and interactive quizzes.

The project team overcame multiple challenges related to creating an open online course including: updating and expanding outdated curricular content published in a format designed for in-person instruction; reworking content focused on teaching research data management to librarians for a broader research focused audience; managing a project team consisting of multiple professionals from multiple organizations participating in a variety of roles; and identifying an open source learning management platform that met the development team's needs and constraints. This presentation addresses the lessons learned about developing interactive online curriculum for a wide public audience, and explores making curricular materials openly accessible, sharable, reusable, and responsive to change. Key takeaways from this project will assist future course development, adding to best practices for creating massive open online courseware. The authors share their standardized conceptual framework for online educational development design and delivery as well as look forward to the feasibility of widely sharing curricular materials more openly.

A review of the NIH Plan for Increasing Access to Scientific Publications and Digital Scientific Data from NIH Funded Scientific Research. In this presentation we will discuss the existing requirements and tools for the NIH Public Access Policy and outline upcoming changes to the NIH model. Specifically, we will review the NIH response to the 2013 OSTP directive for increased public access to scholarly publications and digital data resulting from NIH-funded research, highlighting areas where librarians can anticipate potential service and outreach opportunities.