Radical Change and Data – reflections on the RDAP Summit 2021

For years, I’ve looked at the programme for the Research Data Access and Preservation Summit with interest and wished I could attend to get inspirations from colleagues in the UK. With the summit being virtual in 2021, I finally managed to attend. The topic “Radical Change and Data” felt well aligned with the theme of the upcoming IDCC and I really enjoyed the three days of conference, even if they turned my days into rather long zoom sessions. In this blog post, I will summarize my highlights and reflections.

The summit opened with a keynote by Dr. Tonia Sutherland who talked us through her thinking about critical refusal as data practice. It explored critical access to archives and historical data and how making historical records available might re-create trauma for some communities, especially those that so far did not have a lot of agency over their records. Dr. Sutherland’s talk raised many points that I as a white person from a colonial power do not think about often enough and I cannot wait to read more of her work.

I also learned about DNA as storage medium which was raised at IDCC13 but somehow has passed me by for 8 years.

DMPs and FAIR practices

For our work at the DCC, the panel on data management plans and FAIR practices was most relevant. Maja Dolinar from the ADP Social Sciences Data Archives introduced trustworthy (certified) repositories and efforts to align CoreTrustSeal with the FAIR principles which is a FAIRsFAIR activity that the DCC is involved in, so keep an eye out for further publications. This talk was followed by Dessi Kirilova from the Qualitative Data Repository who presented some really interesting analysis into institutional ethics review board policies and the fact that barely any of them mention data sharing and tie in with data management plans and repository workflows. This ties in nicely with some of the case studies on integrating DMPs into ethic workflows that DCC colleagues are working on. I loved some of Dessi’s ideas for improvement such as asking for consent forms when reviewing a DMP instead of supplying DMPs as part of the ethics review. I think this is a really nice and easy way to raise awareness among researchers. The last presentation was by Heather Ganshorn who developed a DMP template for systematic reviews for the Portage Network’s DMP Assistant tool. This is a great way to engage researchers with DMPs that “don’t do data” and as DMP Assistant uses the same codebase as DMPonline, we could import the template if there is interest from the DMPonline community.

I also want to give a shout out to colleagues at the UK Data Service that provided an overview of moving their services online. It was especially interesting as some of the sensitive data is usually only accessible in Safe Pods or Secure Labs from designated locations and with many campuses being closed, those secure locations were not accessible any longer. They moved all their training and checks around that online which provides the potential to make their data collections available internationally. I also liked their acknowledgement that this was possible because the teams were good at what they are doing – over the difficult last 12 months, we often did not pause to recognize what we are achieving in really unusual circumstances!

Lightning talks

Like the rest of the programme, I really enjoyed the lightning talks and here are a few of my highlights that I will keep an eye on:

• “Data Visualizations for Everybody” - highlighting accessibility issues with most of the visualizations we create and some easy rules for improving.
• “Update on the Data Curation Network” – I loved to hear that the network is now also looking into breaking down structural and institutional racism in their work with data. Obviously, this needs a catchy acronym and I am looking forward to hearing more about FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics) in the future.
• “Meet the Data Jobs Data Set” – Abigail Goben has been US library related job ads that mention data management for the past 10 years. I cannot wait to see the initial analysis of how the job expectations developed and I am glad to see the RDA data stewardship professionalization IG build up a similar dataset.

I also managed to attend some of the workshops hosted alongside the summit. I really enjoyed discussing teaching carpentries lessons and how it can tie in with research data management training. There is a clear connection to me which is one of the reasons why I trained as a carpentries instructor as I think the lessons are a great starting point for data management conversations. The facilitator team from the University of California did a great job introducing some of the topics they feel would make good additions to existing carpentry lessons such as data evaluation and citation and discussing personally identifiable information and anonymization strategies. The biggest challenge seemed to be that there will be too much material to cover and designing sessions that do not lead to cognitive overload will be difficult, especially in virtual training sessions where that point might be reached sooner than in a face to face session. The group also discussed who would be suitable to teach such an holistic RDM programme. The CODATA-RDA Data Science Schools are one example of bringing carpentries and other training material together and it is great to have the DCC contribute RDM content to those and FAIRsFAIR supporting the wider roll out of the schools..

You can find the full programme here, slides and some recordings are made available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/meetings/rdap2021/