Search results for: research services

Rethinking the library repository: a focus on masters’ and doctoral theses

Author: Connie Clare (Community Manager, 4TU.ResearchData)

Image by chenspec from Pixabay 

TU Delft’s current Library repository infrastructure, based on Islandora, comprises different instances for searching and downloading various research outputs:

(i) The research repository comprises scientific publications, including journal articles and doctoral theses;
(ii) The research data repository (4TU.ResearchData) comprises data and software code;
(iii) The education repository comprises student reports, including bachelors and masters’ theses, and; 
(iv) The cultural heritage repository comprises part of TU Delft’s heritage collection. 

Aims and objectives

TU Delft’s Digital Services Programme aims to rethink the strategic direction and technical infrastructure of the Library repository. Part of this programme is focused on improving the impact and visibility of scholarly theses online. 

As the final piece of study in a degree course, a thesis is one of the most important pieces of writing a researcher must undertake. Therefore, we believe it important to offer researchers an opportunity to present their theses in an innovative and attractive manner that enables them to feel proud of their work. In doing so, we must also ensure that the process of publishing theses, and underlying data and code, is easy and streamlined to improve the connectivity between different research outputs. 

At present, our research and educational repositories provide basic metadata and standard pdf download functionalities. Below, we present some ideas for front-end developments and features that could improve the way we showcase scholarly theses in our library repository (see the original document here). 

Metadata:

1. Are searchable in Google 

Full text theses and metadata needs to be discoverable in search engines, such as Google and Google scholar, to ensure that highly valuable and impactful scholarly research is not hidden from the world. In particular, it appears that TU Delft masters’ theses exhibit poor findability on the internet which results in poor visibility and impact for students and supervisors. 

2. Provides links to author and supervisor(s) profile

It could be beneficial to link the author and supervisor research profile to the theses. Taking a look at this example doctoral thesis from Bangor University’s Theses repository, a thesis metadata record links to the author’s research profile, their affiliation (School/Faculty/Department) (Figure 1), awarding institution, and supervisor(s) research profile(s) (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Metadata record links to the author’s profile and research affiliation.
Figure 2. Metadata record links to awarding institution and supervisor(s) research profiles.

In this example, the author and supervisor researcher profiles provide contact information (including an ORCID ID), teaching and supervision responsibilities, education and academic qualifications, research outputs, professional activities and awards, peer-reviewed publications, research activities and a list of scholarly theses that they have contributed to (Figure 3). 


Could a connection between TU Delft’s theses repositories and Research Portal (based on the Pure system for recording research outputs) provide a similar detailed overview?

Figure 3. A supervisor’s research profile links to research outputs, activities and a list of theses they have contributed to.

3. Includes usage report metrics

Researchers are increasingly looking to usage report metrics, such as views, downloads, citations and altmetrics (e.g. social media mentions) to understand a publication’s impact. We report such metrics for data and software code items in our research data repository, and perhaps could also provide such information for scholarly theses. 


By way of example, the University College London’s research repository provides information about the total number of downloads, downloads over the past month and year, and by country (Figure 4). 

Figure 4. Download metrics available for a master’s thesis published in UCL discovery.

4. Includes a graphical abstract or word cloud

A graphical abstract could be provided alongside the textual abstract of a thesis to provide a single, concise, pictorial and visual summary of the main findings of the article. It could either be the concluding figure from the thesis or a figure specially designed for the purpose, which captures the content of the article for readers at a single glance.

A word cloud (tag cloud) or weighted list could also be used as a novelty visual representation of text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata (tags) on websites, or to visualize free form text. This can be used to quickly demonstrate the most prominent terms and keywords related to a thesis. 

Scholarly theses: 

1. Are available as an online visual and in downloadable formats

Currently, most repositories provide the option to download scholarly theses as a pdf document, and some, but not all offer the option to preview the publication online. 

To make the thesis more visual and interactive it could be viewed as an e-book, such as this example doctoral thesis created using FlippingBook.com. The e-book format allows the reader to turn pages, or search contents using thumbnails or the search icon (Figure 5).

Figure 5. An example PhD thesis viewed as an e-book using FlippingBook.com

Sections of the thesis could be navigated by the table of contents, downloadable by chapter, and available for download in different formats to improve accessibility and interoperability. 

Pdf

Pdf formats are ideal for printing but are difficult to browse, challenging to read on handheld devices such as phones, hostile to screen readers, and impractical to search engines. What’s more, they’re large files that require extra software, memory and CPU power relative to the other formats described herein. 

HTML, Epub and Mobi

These electronic documents are reflowable and resizable that can adapt their presentation to the output device. The advantage of these formats is that no matter the size of the device, the thesis will always be displayed correctly, they’re compatible with screen readers and search engine optimization.

HTML is a HyperText Markup Language file format used as the basis of a web page containing text and images. Converting a pdf thesis into html allows the reader to choose a font size and window width so text is easier to read and paragraphs are formatted to the reader’s preference which is more suitable for readers with visual impairments (read more here). 

Epub and Mobi are the most commonly used e-book formats. Epub is a free, open standard, publicly available format that’s similar to HTML. As the most widely supported format, it’s supported by almost all e-readers and e-book reading apps. The Mobi format is specifically designed for mobile devices and e-readers with a smaller screen, including the Amazon Kindle. 

2. Includes embedded multimedia

Research focused theses may contain a plurality of multimedia (e.g. images, graphics, figures, tables, videos and model simulations) that could be better showcased in a HTML ebook format. For example, images could be individually downloaded as a .jpg or .gif file for reuse.

It might also be useful to display multimedia, such as figures, as a slideshow that can be viewed separately from the thesis (Figure 6). 

Figure 6. Figures, images, tables and other media can be viewed as a slideshow separate to the thesis.

3. Provides links to underlying data and software code

In order to improve connectivity between the research/educational repositories and research data repository, it would be beneficial to provide a link between theses and underlying data and software code published in 4TU.ResearchData (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Hovering over an embedded figure or in-text citation could provide a link (DOI) to the underlying data published in 4TU.ResearchData.

4. Includes a citation grabber and bibliography maker 

There are a multitude of reference management tools and citation generators available to make creating citations, reference lists and bibliographies easier. An in-built citation grabber could automatically download citations within a thesis in a selected format (BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, RefWorks) and creates a bibliography that can be downloaded separately from theses. 

5. Can be linked to a professional portfolio 

Students and researchers are often enthusiastic to link their thesis and graduation reports to their professional portfolio or CV. Perhaps this could be facilitated by creating an interactive webpage to showcase the thesis (Figure 8).

Figure 8. An interactive webpage to demonstrate research outputs associated with a thesis.

With grateful thanks to Alastair Dunning (Head, Research Services), Amineh Ghorbani (Assistant professor, Faculty of Technology Policy and Management) and Jeff Love (Data Steward, Faculty of Industrial Design and Engineering) for contributing ideas that lead to the creation of this article.

If you have ideas for how to showcase masters’ and doctoral theses at TU Delft, please contact us, we’d love to hear from you.

Behind the scenes of our new open science website

We have launched a new open science website for TU Delft (TUD)- check it out 🎊

Here, we retrace our footsteps and share some of the work behind the scenes and lessons we have learned while constructing this website. We hope that this will be helpful for open research services that are looking to build an online presence to better support and inspire their research and teaching communities.

The starting points

TU Delft has had multiple open science websites; perhaps most notably, the open science guide designed in 2017 has subsequently inspired other institutions’ open science websites. 

So why a new design? The start of the new Strategic Programme Open Science 2020-24 (OSP) represents revitalised efforts from the TUD leadership to invest in 10 areas of open science. The open science guide design was practical and straightforward but not very scalable beyond open access and data. We – the OSP team – wanted and needed a new channel to communicate with our community: one that can represent and host the diverse initiatives and opportunities arising from our work, one that we can easily refer our colleagues, from Faculty staff to librarians from other institutions, to for them to learn more about our work.

We also recognise that open science is an actively evolving and complex topic: from funders’ mandates and institutional policies to training opportunities and support personnel, there are many moving, somewhat related pieces of information that researchers, teachers, students and staff can/should learn about. We would like the new website to be an easy-to-access resource, a trusted source of information from which our community can always rely on to stay up-to-date.

Last but not least, we’d like to recognise the many open champions at TUD and showcase their work through the website. Many TUD researchers and teachers have been pushing boundaries, actively asking themselves how to be more open and inclusive with their work. The website should promote the voices of open advocates from all corners of TUD, inspire others to reflect on their ways of working and encourage discussions around open research and education practices. 

Telling the many stories

The second goal 👆 was particularly challenging for us: researchers and staff at TUD have varying levels of understanding in open science. The information they would like to have to practise open science would differ based on their career and research fields. 

TUD researchers and staff have different levels of engagement with open science. Avatars designed by Vitaly Gorbachev from Flaticon

To better understand our audience, their motivations for engaging with open science and the obstacles in their ways, we created four user personas together with the OSP team during 1-hour workshops. This exercise helped us reflect on our interactions with TUD researchers, teachers and staff, and helped us prioritise goals and features for the first version of the website.

One of the OSP website’s primary user persona, co-developed by the OSP team. User persona template adapted from Development Impact and You by Nesta (CC-BY-NC-SA).

Less is more

How can we design for all the different paths our users will take in their open science journeys? Our initial plan was to provide an elaborate set of interlinked resources so that users can naturally start where they find most useful (and indeed, we expect most website users to not land on the site via the homepage). Users will then be guided (e.g. through “related resources” and menus) to other pieces of content that may interest them.

A first design for the OSP website’s information architecture – very comprehensive but too complex for both users and maintainers!

A key lesson from the persona exercise and feedback from the team was that this is too overwhelming: not only for newcomers to open science who maybe don’t have a concrete idea of what open science is but also for the team that has to maintain this site. 

Marieke Roggeveen, the OSP’s former communication advisor, suggested trimming down the site to three sections that form a central narrative:

  • Define: What is open science? This section provides a gentle introduction to newcomers.
  • Apply: How can you practise open science? This section lists selected opportunities, resources and experts contact that users can read about to learn or get help on practising open science in their work. 
  • Contribute: Share your experience and inspire others to learn and follow. Sharing and learning are central to the ethos of open science, and we want to create a space for our users to do just that.

For the Apply and Contribute sections, we will build filters to enable users to find and navigate the content they are interested in quickly. Instead of putting all the services and resources we offer on the website, we can use web analytics to help refine and update the selected list in future iterations of the site.

Assembling the building blocks

Once we had identified a rough structure and critical goals, we worked with UX/UI designer Sammy de Keijne, who turned our ideas into wireframes and prototypes.

So far, all our designs are based on our understanding of and assumptions about users’ behaviours. For that reason, we needed to involve real target users in our work as soon as possible to (in)validate our assumptions and identify areas needing attention and improvement.

The design prototype of the OSP website for testing, designed by Sammy de Keijne.

We tested our interactive prototype with five users from the TUD community: researchers from different faculties and career stages and research support staff not in the OSP. We learnt a lot from seeing how they navigate through the prototype and listening to their questions and thoughts in that process.

Through this exercise, we understood that language and word choices significantly impact users’ experience, and we need to test them more carefully. For example, we initially had a heading called “open science 101”, and user testing showed that many did not understand what “101” meant. We also learnt that numbers and data intrigued and appealed to our audience.

A picture speaks a thousand words

The visual identity is like the “personality” of our website and work, and it helps set expectations, contextualise our work and create recognition. We wanted to have a distinct, coherent visual identity across our website and communication assets.

For this, we worked with visual designer Martijn van Overbruggen. Based on a mood board that we curated, Martijn built colour schemes and a graphical style that we felt represented what open science meant to us: leaves that symbolise growth, lines and circles that capture the dynamic nature of open science, a rough texture that invites refinement, vibrant colours the resonate with freshness and creativity (while still aligned with the TU Delft colour palette). 

Creating a coherent visual identity for the open science programme. Designs by Martijn van Overbruggen at WIM Ontwerpers

While we understand the power of visual illustrations, building one that is intuitive enough to understand at a glance yet captures the right amount of nuance has proven to be a huge challenge. One of our biggest challenges was to create the graphic to “define open science”: how can one showcase the fluid and contextual nature of open science with a static graphic? We went through many iterations, re-scoping, rearranging and rewording various elements, to arrive at our current version.

Our many attempts to gently introduce the audience to open science. Designs by Marieke Roggeveen, Martijn van Overbruggen, Marieke Hopley and Emmy Tsang.

Wrestling with the CMS

The TUD website’s “technical backbone” is the content management system (CMS) TYPO3. We prioritised exploring the capabilities of TYPO3 at the start of our design process. It allowed us to understand design constraints and estimate the time and resources required to implement various website elements. For example, having an interactive graphic is possible but would require additional front-end development capacity. 

Having these possibilities and constraints in mind helped keep our graphics and wireframes realistic for implementation – our colleagues at Online Solutions were able to construct the web pages based on our designs efficiently.

Feedback, feedback, feedback

With the first version of our test site online, we shared this with the OSP team for feedback. The feedback cycle at this stage was essential: fresh eyes on our work allowed us to check if we had delivered what we intended and helped us spot errors from strange layouts on mobile devices to typos.

It was vital to manage expectations, both our own and of those who contributed, at this stage: we want to go live with the site as soon as possible, without critical errors. For that, we provided instructions for giving constructive feedback and roughly parcelled the feedback we received into three categories: “easy to fix”, “hard but critical”, and “hard and for later”. This helped us prioritise the changes to implement before launch.

With our new communications advisor Marieke Hopley, we addressed some critical issues regarding the narrative and graphics on our homepage based on the feedback. We also added an “about page” to bring transparency to the open science programme. We have a list of suggested improvements for a second iteration of the site, including having Dutch pages.

Only the beginning

The launch is the first step in this journey. Becoming a trusted resource for a community will require maintenance of the site: regular updates, new stories, and more. We have to build a robust management workflow with team members to draft new content, monitor the pages for outdated materials and errors, approve edits and new pages, and implement changes. 

We also have to continue to raise awareness for the website and ensure that new and existing staff members are aware of its existence and purpose. Ultimately, we hope that the website will not only serve as a source of open science information from OSP staff, but a platform on which TUD academics, students and staff can share their knowledge and perspectives, a gateway for our community to learn about and contribute to open science. 

—

Acknowledgements: In addition to the people mentioned in the post, we would like to take this opportunity to thank:

  • The TUD OSP team for your ideas, feedback and patience throughout the entire process.
  • TUD data stewards and Connie Clare (Community Manager, 4TU.ResearchData) for your help and support especially during the initial brainstorming stages of this site. Your deep understanding of our target user groups had been crucial in guiding our work.
  • Members of the Open Science Community Delft who took time to help us test the design prototype.
  • TUD’s Online Solutions, especially Inge and Noor, for turing our prototype into reality and advising on the various CMS issues.

Making Priorities for Digital Sovereignty

Discussions at the Leiden University & Elsevier Symposium on Digital Sovereignty, held on 29 November, illustrated how complex yet necessary this relatively new concept of digital sovereignty is. Even the representative from Microsoft, was convinced of the importance of the term. For him, it is a way for gaining and securing customers’ trust, privacy and security for the digital services they provide (and, of course, making a profit)

Public Values in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities for the Netherlands Speaker: Azar Koulibaly, JD, Microsoft

Azar Koulibaly from Microsoft giving his presentation on ‘Public Values in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities for the Netherlands‘

In the Dutch university sector, we already have some projects that are inspired by the broader discussion over digital sovereignty. There is the Public Spaces movement, largely initiated by the broadcasters, but with some interest from higher education.  Surf is making various eye-catching projects, such as its own Large Language Model, and has started an Open Research Information Agenda. And 4TU.ResearchData’s Djehuty data repository software openly invites contributions from the research community. There are others.

But these are still relatively isolated steps. 

Within the university / research library sector we are still missing the crucial conversation about how we can work together, and in what areas we want to prioritise.  

As background context, the diagram by Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman from 2019 remains a relevant depiction of the landscape of research tools. (their related slides anticipate nearly all of this blog post).  It does not depict all the digital services that university researchers make use of it – far from it – but it nevertheless highlights the complexity.

Most importantly, the diagram demonstrates the various arenas within the researcher lifecycle where the university library sector have ceded (consciously or not) digital sovereignty to commercial actors. 

Currently, most universities engage, in a contractual sense, with the providers of these servers in an individual context. University A does a deal for Dimensions, and University B does a deal for Mendeley. This is opposed to deals done for access to  ‘traditional’ publishing, where the Dutch universities have a history of organising collective agreements with the larger publishers

It seems to me that there is plenty of opportunity to work together to deal with this challenge more effectively: in the metaphor of speaker Ron Augustus from Surf, making honey by acting as bees in a colony.

Can we come together rather than work on this independently?

Some of the possible actions for a collective group might be:

  • Defining the key areas on the researcher lifecycle (or indeed for any digital service) where we want to secure (or regain) our digital sovereignty
  • Defining how we want to enact that digital sovereignty
    • By continuing to have contracts with commercial players, but to do so at a collective level and informed by values (such as the Seven Guiding Principles for Research Information)
    • By working together to create our own services to replace the commercial services
    • By make sustained, strategic contributions to existing open source services at a global level (a simple example of which is the contributions made to the governance structure of the service Open Knowledge Maps). These contributions could be technical, financial or intellectual
    • By making sustained, strategic contributions to open source networks such as SCOSS or Invest in Open 
  • And finally, defining what we mean by we. Universities? University Libraries? Medical Centres? Research Units? Or maybe even public sector organisations (broadcasters, museums etc)

As the Leiden symposium demonstrated, digital sovereignty is a problem you can drown in – overwhelmed by its size and complexity – and ending up going nowhere. 

To avoid this, and to ensure our digital sovereignty, we need to make collective priorities. 

Rethinking Research Support – The Problem

Research moves fast. Policies and practices change quickly. Information flows rapidly. Google and other dynamic online services move with blistering speed. Libraries have a hard time keeping up.

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Photo by Margaret Weir on Unsplash

I have recently been appointed Head of Research Services at TU Delft Library. One of my first tasks is to review how effectively our services, advice and support is communicated to the research community. 

We have some great services. We have an Open Publishing Platform for hosting open access journals; along with the eight faculties we have a team of fast-moving Data Stewards; we have a strategy and expertise guidance in place to ensure that all necessary documentation from the university is archived in accordance with Dutch archival laws; we have a long-running archive for research data. There are many more. 

And of course, the Library is not the only group running services for researchers. Our colleagues in ICT, Legal Services and Valorisation Centre all help staff during different aspects of the research life cycle

This creates a profusion of services.  The services are good. But the way they are communicated is awful. 

The rationale, help and background for all of these services are usually dumped on the university website. The ideal website is a sleek and concise piece of ingenious design, providing answers in seconds. Most university websites, however, are a sprawling mass of text and images, out of date or 404 pages, with conflicting or unclear information.

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Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Going to the university website is like that moment you come back from a long holiday and find a mass of letters, brochures, business cards and magazines stuffed through your letterbox. Where to start?

I’ve not run any focus groups, but I suspect that researchers would find it difficult to find information about these university services. Most will resort to Google, or knocking or their neighbour’s door. These can be useful solutions, but they don’t necessarily point back to the library services. The library is leaking customers. 

Before we try and find solutions to this, it’s worth looking at some of the particular problems we face in dumping all our service information on the university website. If we start to identify these, then we can start to create something better for researchers.

1) Siloed content – Services are not presented in an integrated way. For instance,  one service for data management might be run by library, and a related one by ICT. But they do not refer to one another at all. 

2) Guidance is text heavy – do visitors really like wading through long scrolls of text? Some might, but they are few.  But others need quick, immediate guidance via text, image, video or walkthrough. (Additionally, how can we make the services themselves more intuitive so less guidance is needed?)

3) Excess of articles. Researchers are pressed for time. They want to concentrate on their research. So having multiple pages describe features will drive researchers to distraction

4) For editors and administrators, it’s not easy either. Publishing information via a website Content Management System can be a distressing usability experience. Often the website editor is not the expert on the actual service, leading to further difficulties in getting the right content online.

5) University websites are organisation focussed not service focussed; they are organised in a way that reflect how a department is line managed. (Good businesses never do this) But researchers don’t really care which service or department runs a tool they need – they just want to get access to the tool.

6) Lack of community ownership. This is a more intangible problem.  Researchers often avoid library or other websites run by the support teams, because such websites don’t quite speak the researchers’ language.  The don’t build up a sense of a user community. Truly great university services and related guidance would give researchers a stake in how these services are run and described

So, there we have it. Some of the key problems in advertising library and other services. I will follow this up with a second blog post looking at some of the solutions. 

 

 

Data Stewardship at TU Delft – 2020 Report

Authors (listed in alphabetical order by the first name): Esther Plomp, Heather Andrews, Jeff Love, Kees den Heijer, Nicolas Dintzner, Santosh Ilamparuthi, Yan Wang, Yasemin Turkyilmaz-van der Velden

A special year for TUD data stewards

2020 has passed in a very special way for many people, the same for the TUD data stewards team. It was an important year with various types of changes for the data stewardship and the team. This is the moment we look back at what we have done during the year, and acknowledge our progress and achievement as a team.

Programme transition towards sustainability

The pilot program of data stewardship approached its completion at the end of 2020. Throughout the year, the positions of data stewards have been transforming from being funded by the central library to being funded by the individual faculties. Most faculties have made the positions permanent and the others are in the process towards the same setting. This is really a great achievement and an important step for the sustainable development of the data stewardship at TU Delft.

Transition within the team

The team experienced a transition period in the middle of the year. The former coordinator Marta Teperek was promoted to become the head of TU Delft Library research data services and Yan Wang, the former data steward of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, took over the task of coordination. This transition was smooth thanks to the continuous support from Marta and the fact that Yan was already a member of the team. More importantly, the team has become mature after years’ of working together: data stewards can independently handle data management demands at faculties and the team is able to self-manage in a very collaborative manner.

Impact of the pandemic

We can not omit the impact of the COVID pandemic on our work and life. Since mid March 2020, we switched to the mode of working from home. All the regular activities, like team meetings, RDM consultations, training and events, were forced to take place online. The team adapted to the situation quickly, not just changing the ways of working, but also actively experimented how to improve working remotely for different occasions. It was challenging without seeing each other in person, but the team managed to keep the spirits in the (continuous) hard time.

Team achievements across all faculties

Despite the drastic change in the ways of working and team dynamics, it was still a fruitful and productive year for the data stewards both as a team and individually. 

As a team, we have made significant progress on the following activities across all eight faculties. 

Data management consultation

  • The most direct outcome of our work is reflected in the consultations provided to researchers. In total the team supported more than 800 requests from researchers on data management plans and other data management issues. This has been almost doubled compared to the support provided in the previous year. 

Trainings & Education

  • Faculty-level research data management training has been further established and conducted by data stewards. According to specific faculty needs, such as the number of PhDs, the demands of data management activities etc., data stewards collaborate with the faculty graduate schools or departments to provide customized training support for all researchers and some master or bachelor programs. Some faculties have made such training compulsory for PhD students and provide it on a regular basis. 
  • We have also expanded the training support at the university level and beyond. In addition to the regular software carpentry workshops, some data stewards also provided disciplinary workshops, including the genomic data carpentry workshop, code refinery workshop, and social science data carpentry workshop. Some of these workshops were collaborated with other institutions and the data stewards played important roles in instruction and coordination. 

Policy & Strategy

  • Another structural impact of data stewardship is the faculty data management policies. Till early 2021, all faculties have approved the data management policies. All the data stewards have been working on implementing the policies or providing guidance into practical daily research activities according to faculty specific situations.  

Besides the above common achievements shared by the whole team, each data steward also provided extensive faculty specific support and combined their disciplinary needs into research or personal development.

Faculty of Aerospace Engineering

Disciplinary RDM support

  • Provided awareness raising and disciplinary RDM guidance for projects like ReMAP and STEP4WIND on research deliverables, project data security and publishing. 
  • Assisted design and development of ASCM Code Initiative for students and researchers (on-going pilot). 
  • Assisted establishing collaboration between 4TU.ResearchData with AIAA Aeroelastic Community (on-going).
  • Assisted AE Project Support Team (PST-AE) sessions 
  • to establish better communication and more effective workflows between the contract managers, finance team, project support and Data Steward.

Event and Community engagement

  • Intensified the engagement of researchers in the Open Science community with a doubled number of data champions from the faculty. 
  • Continuous outreach to new staff members with customized RDM info package.
  • Invited to provide training sessions and knowledge exchange on RDM, data/code archiving and publishing with 3 universities in Costa Rica, Spain and Austria. 
  • Invited speaker for INOS project.  

Self-development

  • Attended SURFsara training (HPC and supercomputer infrastructure).

Research and Publication

  • Faculty Open Access publishing statistics analysis. 

Faculty of Applied Sciences

Disciplinary RDM support

  • Started monthly PhD newsletters at the faculty
  • Joined the Faculty Graduate School on their tours across the departments
  • Member of a cross-TU Delft working group (involving the Library and ICT) about Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN)s 

Event and Community engagement

  • Part of the Think Tank of TU Delft OPEN publishing
  • Invited to provide Research Data Management training to Graz University of Technology staff, Austria.
  • Co-organised the 10th anniversary commemoration and relaunch of 4TU.ResearchData
  • Co-chair of RDA group: Physical Samples and Collections in the Research Data Ecosystem IG
  • Invited speaker at 8 (international) events, presented 3 posters and attended over 22 (international) events
  • Program committee member of the Open Science Festival
  • Organised one of the Data Steward Interest Group Meetings and played an active role in these meetings/ the Slack channel.
  • (Co)authored 12 blog posts on Open Working

Self-development

Research and Publication

Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment

Disciplinary RDM support 

  • Lead the coordination of the TUD Digital Humanities community
  • Contributed to one disciplinary reproducibility guidelines

Event and Community engagement

  • Recurring guest in the PhD onboarding course offered at the central graduate school
  • Invited speaker or session organizer at five (inter)national events
  • Co-chair of RDA professionalizing data stewardship IG
  • Served on the advisory board of TU Delft OPEN publishing and suggested to include the contributor statement (CrediT) in the publishing policy

Research and Publication

Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Disciplinary RDM support

  • Lead the implementation, onboarding and supervision of data managers at TU Delft and liaise with the Digital Competence Center
  • Took a leading role in emphasising the importance of management information on data for proper recognition of good data management practices
  • Co-organised week-long disciplinary RDM course (in framework of research school “Centre for Technical Geoscience”)

Event and Community engagement

  • Established the data managers community at TU Delft (on-going)

Self-development

  • Microsoft certification Azure Fundamentals

Research and publication

  • Developed the tool for automated DMPonline notifications for TU Delft instance
  • Established the workflow of handling DMP requests and provided daily support 

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics 

Disciplinary RDM support

  • Lead the development of the Data Access Committee for handling of personal and confidential data

Event and Community engagement

  • Project lead of the Open Hardware project of the Open Science Programme at TU Delft
  • Maintained the Data Champions newsletter and co-facilitated the transition to the Open Science Community Delft
  • Co-organised the 10th anniversary commemoration and relaunch of 4TU.ResaerchData 
  • Co-chair of RDA Discipline-specific Guidance for Data Management Plans Working Group
  • Invited speaker at multiple (inter)national RDM and open science events
  • Presentations and panel member in events on privacy in research data  
  • Contributed to five blog posts on TU Delft open woking blog

Research and Publication

  • Provided input and review of 4TU data deposition policy
  • Contributed to the development of Beyond Essentials for Data Support course

Faculty of Industrial Design and Engineering

Disciplinary RDM support

  • Collaborating on the development ‘Responsible Data’ modules for BSc courses at the faculty
  • Contributing to body of knowledge and materials in the Data-Centric Design community in IDE: https://datacentricdesign.org/
  • Member of successful H2020 Training Network grant on the future of digital design: https://www.dcode-network.eu/ (temporary site)
  • Participated in external research assessment of IDE faculty on themes of ethics and infrastructure

Event and Community engagement

  • Growing the TUD ‘Digital Humanities’ community with colleagues in BK, EWI and LR

Research and Publication

  • Ran pilot of automated transcription software with colleagues in ICT Innovation
  • Published an Open Access book from work in previous research team

Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Disciplinary RDM support

  • Facilitated the Coding Assistant & Research Software Engineer Pilot at 3mE, in collaboration with the library
  • Member of a cross-TU Delft working group (involving the Library and ICT) about Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN)s 

Event and Community engagement

Research and Publication

Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management

Disciplinary RDM support

  • Contributed to the design of ReproJuice – the Reproducibility Game (currently being deployed) in collaboration with the Game lab
  • Contributed to the MSc workshops on code/software management (part of the “REDCAR” initiative)
  • Provided support to student projects involving personal data as part of BSc MOT-9591 lecture 
  • Provided tutorials and reviews on project specific RDM outputs. 
  • Started the development of a RDM check-out procedure for retiring colleagues. 

Research and publications

Looking forward

Till the moment, the team is still working remotely but with ongoing and new development. The team is in full gear again after going through the transition period by having a new member joined in February. We look forward to intensifying the cultural change towards good data management and open science in the research community, while also to further shaping our data stewardship model.

The importance of data management and demands for data stewards have become evident. We feel proud of our achievements meanwhile also acknowledge many challenges ahead, such as making data management support sustainable with structural institutional changes, better aligning with other research services in the research management ecosystem, further exploring disciplinary RDM solutions and guidance, evaluating the effectiveness of data stewardship in both qualitative and quantitative ways, professionalising data stewardship as a well recognized career path and so on. These are all questions we have and we will carry them onwards in the coming year(s).

Teaching Reproducible Research and Open Science Conference at Sheffield University

Last month (June 20-22), the trainer for Research Data Management and Digital skills from the Research Data and Software Team from TU Delft Library (RDS), Carlos Utrilla Guerrero  was invited as guest speaker at Sheffield University in a three day ‘Teaching Reproducible Research and Open Science Conference’,  to share our experience implementing the vision for Research Data and Software management training at TUDelft and teaching the RDM101 course, to help researchers develop the necessary skills to work as efficiently, reproducibly, and openly as possible.

The three-day event (20 June) kicked off with a symposium ‘Perspectives on teaching reproducibility’ organised by Sheffield Methods Institute (SMI) in collaboration with the University Library and Open Research Working Group (ORWG), and led by Aneta Piekut (SMI) and Jenni Adams (Library). The activities focused on incorporating reproducible methods in teaching reproducible research. It was attended by approximately 40 participants.

In Carlos’s talk (https://zenodo.org/record/8158825), he spoke about Delft’s commitment to doing science responsibly in a way that maximises the positive benefits to society. This symposium provided an excellent opportunity for us to illustrate with examples how we motivate, and provide practice opportunities to researchers  to engage them in learning about the benefits of reproducibility.

The Symposium stimulated interdisciplinary exchange of best practice in doing and teaching open research. The participants discussed different approaches on embedding open science principles in taught programmes in such disciplines, like computer science (Neil Shephard, University of Sheffield), engineering (Alice Pyne, Univ. of Sheffield and Carlos Utrilla Guerrero, TU Delft Library), social sciences (Jenniffer Buckley, Univ. of Manchester and Julia Kasmire, UK Data Service, Jim Uttley, Univ. of Sheffield), geo-data-science (Jon Reades and Andy MacLachlan, UCL), psychology (Marina Bazhydai, Lancaster Univ. and Lisa DeBruine, Univ. of Glasgow). Project TIER’s Directors also gave the first keynote speech arguing in favour of saturating quantitative methods instruction with reproducibility. In the second keynote of the day, Helena Paterson from School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow reflected on the School journey of redesigning the psychology undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum to focus on teaching reproducible methods and analysis.

On day two, (21 June) Norm and Richard delivered a UKRN accredited workshop (Repository: https://osf.io/3jwyz/) on integrating principles of transparency and reproducibility into quantitative methods courses and research training. During the final day (22 June) Project TIER’s Directors were available for individual and small-group meetings with instructors interested in introducing reproducible methods into their classes.

The conference and workshop was a great opportunity to get to know practices and use cases of embedding open science and reproducible research in teaching activities in different fields. A useful piece of advice from several attendees about effective methods for teaching reproducibility is that today’s students (MSc and BSc) are potentially tomorrow’s researchers, and so integrating reproducibility into the undergraduate curriculum will be crucial in promoting and implementing reproducible practices in the long term. This is in line with the work of the TU Delft Library’s Data Literacy Project, an initiative of the Open Science Programme that launched in March 2023. The Data Literacy Project is investigating how to integrate skills on data literacy and open science practices into the BsC and MsC programmes at TU Delft. Please contact project leader Paige Folsom for more information about the project: P.M.Folsom@tudelft.nl.

Resources:

Event Program: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/smi/events/teaching-reproducible-research-and-open-science-conference

Presentations: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1uWLbbFscxVsxtdtpcbXz2KWeA417R0so 

The programme Booklet: https://issuu.com/smi_events/docs/teaching_reproducibility 

RDM 101 openly available as a self-learning resource: https://tu-delft-library.github.io/rdm101-book 

Research Support and the TU Delft Digital Strategy

TU Delft is currently writing a digital strategy for 2024-30. It’s due to be approved in spring 2023, but work is already beginning on its implementation. 

The strategy has eight sections

  1. Students and Education 
  2. Research and Innovation
  3. People and Community
  4. Campus and Service Provision
  5. Digital Skills 
  6. Data
  7. Security & Privacy
  8. Digital Infrastructure in the workplace

Along with Robert van Bremeen from ICT, I am responsible for the research and innovation section. We have identified four key areas where the university’s approach to digital can have a positive impact on the practice of research. These followed discussions with those writing the Digital Strategy and workshops involving researchers and others from the university.

The workshops identified some broad themes. For example, the crucial importance of a trusted infrastructure for sharing data; the amount of unstructured data that was created by researchers but never reused; the importance of good training, and staff support; and the growing importance of software.

The themes were summarised as the four areas shown in the image below.

Four areas for Research and Innovation in the draft Digital Strategy
Four areas for Research and Innovation in the draft Digital Strategy

We then took this a step further, and identified both existing initiatives and new ones that are needed in order to turn the four areas into specific, actionable projects. 

Current and new initiatives in the research domain
Current and new initiatives in the research domain

This draft diagram still needs some work, but it gives an indication of these initiatives.

This discussion is of course just the first step. The work now begins of turning these fine ideas into practice. 
For this step, ICT and the Library will appoint a kwartiermaker to explore how this list of initiatives can be turned into a programme with specific projects under it.  The programme currently has the name of the Research Hub.

The kwartiermaker will be discussing these initiatives with researchers, support staff, managers and others across the university – in conversations, meetings, workshops and other forums. The goal is to have a defined programme for the Research Hub, including a list of projects by mid 2023. 

Celebrating 4TU.ResearchData’s Role in Fostering Open Science

Authors: Esther Plomp

The 29th of September 2020 was a big day for 4TU.ResearchData and its team as we celebrated the 10th anniversary and launch of the renewed data repository in the form of a 2-hour online event using the hashtag #10years4TUResearchData.

The event was opened by Marjolein Drent (University Librarian at the University of Twente) who welcomed us and chaired the event. Marjolein introduced us to Alastair Dunning (Head of Research Services at TU Delft Library and previous Head of 4TUResearchData) who delivered the opening speech in which he took us back to the start of 4TU.Research data, or rather, 3TU Datacentrum (see also the blogpost here). Alastair found that much of what was written in the 2006 Report on user requirements of researchers that would use the archive back then is still relevant today. Back in 2006 concerns were already expressed about the time investment and lack of incentives required for practising good data management, as well as a lack of standardisation in these practises. In order to overcome these challenges it is important to keep building connections between people and work on disciplinary specific networks in the future. 

The event’s keynote speaker, Sarah Jones (EOSC Engagement Manager at Géant), shared the do’s and don’ts of supporting Open Science. She praised 4TU.ResearchData approach as both an institutional and discipline specific repository. Rather than inventing the wheel for themselves, the three technical universities set up a network to tackle the challenge of data preservation. To support researchers in practising open science, data archives and support staff should listen to researchers in order to understand their needs and user requirements. According to Sarah, we should not insist on the ‘open’ too much or be evangelical about it as we may push researchers away rather than engage with them in a meaningful way. Sarah highlighted that we should not reinvent the wheel: If there is already a solution, adopt and adapt that one and only develop a new solution as a last resort. It is crucial to incentivise the practices that we would like to see and practise what we preach. Unfortunately, the pressure to publish is still the main stressor of researchers, as they are usually evaluated on this when they want to progress their careers. Unless we make open science practices valuable to researchers, why would they engage in this work? It is also important to build career paths that focus on data and software stewardship. Innovation and space to fail at innovating are important and Sarah thinks we can learn from businesses that are usually more flexible in their approaches to changes. Commercial partners should be engaged with open science. We should highlight the benefits of working openly to commercial partners rather than shutting everything down from the start by signing closed agreements. According to Sarah it is important to share the lessons learned with the wider community, as is done for example with the OpenWorking blog. Sarah also highlighted some of the issues in procuring services for universities, a concern that will be addressed in one of Géant’s workshops on Delivering Research Data Management Services in November. The main take away from Sarah’s keynote is that the problems that we face in open science are not limited to a specific institution or country: they apply globally and cross discipline lines. We need a collective approach in supporting Open Science and this can only be achieved if we work more closely together.

Tweet by Deirdre Casella (Communications Officer 4TU.ResearchData)

The keynote was followed by an interactive pop quiz that was led by Yan Wang (Data Stewardship Coordinator at TU Delft). The quiz consisted of some very tough questions on data repositories, linked open data, computer programmers, and open source sharing. Participants could refuel their energy in the short break after the quiz.

The popquiz participants visualised through Menti.

After the break we had three live interviews! Qian Zhang (Data Steward at University of Twente) interviewed Arnd Hartmanns (Assistant Professor at University of Twente), Natalia Romero (Assistant Professor at TU Delft), and Mathias Funk (Associate Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology). Arnd thinks that we should share research data in order to be able to compare and reproduce research. Natalia thinks it is useful to share her research data, as she collects costly data that consist primarily of in-depth interviews. She deposited her data with 4TU.ResearchData because the Data Steward of her faculty, Jeff Love, pointed her towards the repository. Mathias did not share his data yet, but said that  “data sharing  is important for replication, community building and education.” Both Arnd and Natalia stated that they chose 4TU.ResearchData because of the community behind the repository, through which they feel supported in archiving their data. According to Arnd “4TU.ResearchData is a natural choice if you work at a 4TU University. It is free, local and it is not some anonymous entity: there are people nearby that care.” Natalia thinks that the Data Stewards and Data Champions contribute to the community and said that the 4TU.ResearchData data funds made it an attractive repository.

4TU.ResearchData is a natural choice if you work at a 4TU University. It is free, local and it is not some anonymous entity: there are people nearby that care. – Arnd Hartmanns

The interviews were followed by five parallel breakout sessions (download the slides here):

  1. Dedicated services for Environmental Researchers (led by Egbert Gramsbergen and Kees den Heijer
  2. Restricted access for confidential/personal data (led by Santosh Ilamparuthi)
  3. ‘Reproducibility’ serious game (led by Nicolas Dintzer)
  4. Expert curation services for FAIR Data (led by Jan van der Heul & Eric Rumondor)
  5. 4TU.ResearchData: Demonstration of new features and functionalities (led by Mark Hahnel)
Tweet from the breakout room led by Jan van der Heul & Eric Rumondor

The breakout sessions were followed by the formal relaunch of 4TU.ResearchData by Madeleine de Smaele (4TU.ResearchData Repository Manager):

Tweet by 4TU.ResearchData

4TU.ResearchData transferred their infrastructure from Fedora to Figshare over the summer. Madeleine stressed that 4TU.ResearchData remains in full control of the repository. Users can now publish data under restricted access. This is useful for data that is confidential or contains personal data. When data is archived under restricted access, re-users have to ask the uploader of the dataset for permission to access the data first. You can also place a temporary embargo on a dataset: if you do so, only metadata about data is available until the embargo ends. This feature is applicable to, for example, papers that are still under review. 4TU.ResearchData now also has an integration with GitHub, which makes it possible to assign DOIs to software and code. Statistics associated with individual datasets are now also publicly visible: you can see the amount of views, downloads and citations of a dataset, as well as their Altmetric score!

After the relaunch of the repository, the directorship of the 4TU.ResearchData (and a literal scepter!) was officially handed over from Alastair to Marta Teperek (Director of 4TU.ResearchData – see this interview). 

Marta shared her vision on 4TU.ResearchData for the future, in which she would like to expand the 4TU.ResearchData community. Having good infrastructure alone is not enough to make data FAIR. Researchers should be supported in doing so by providing them with guidance, training and disciplinary standards. In doing this we need to work together with these communities and take into account disciplinary differences and practises. All 4TU.ResearchData partners now have Data Stewards to support researchers in archiving their data and code. These Data Stewards form a network in the Science, Engineering and Design disciplines which makes it possible to move much faster together and develop better solutions! Marta invited all the participants to collaborate in our journey towards FAIR data.

Tweet by Hannah Blyth (PhD student from Nottingham University and intern at 4TU.ResearchData)

The meeting was closed by Merle Rodenburg (Director of Data Management and Library, TU Eindhoven) who asked the participants two questions. The first question was about the key take away points of the event and the second question was about the future direction of data repositories. Keywords that came out of the answers were collaboration, FAIR, and community. Collaboration and discipline specific support were found to be very important throughout the meeting, and we are looking forward to working together with you on this! 

Special thanks to: Madeleine, Marjolein, Sarah, Merle, Ardi, Berjan, Egbert, Arie, Jan, Eric, Mark, Alastair, Marta, Deirdre, Femke, Santosh, Yasemin, Esther, Ellen, Kees, Nicolas, Yan, Jeff and everyone who joined the event to celebrate 4TU.ResearchData’s anniversary and relaunch!

All the slides from the event are available on Zenodo.

Looking back at 2022: RDS achievements

Authors: Maribel Barrera, Ashley Cryan, Cecile van Heukelom, Paula Martinez Lavanchy, Iulia Popescu, Madeleine de Smaele, Maaike Smit, Marta Teperek, Carlos Utrilla Guerrero, Yan Wang, Aleksandra Wilczynska

The year 2022 has been one of great achievements for the RDS team. Apart from the running existing services and business-as-usual activities, here’s an outline of our successes and accomplishments over the last year:

Research Data Services

Training

  • Development of a course on working with personal research data 
  • Successful business case for addressing the demand of RDM101 courses for PhD candidates
  • Lookout for 2023:
    • Development of a course on data/software management for supervisors
    • Hiring three more trainers to address the demand for RDM101 training and to further work on the implementation of the Vision for Training

People responsible for this work:

  • Paula Martinez Lavanchy – leading these activities
  • Carlos Utrilla Guerrero (and before Eirini Zormpa) and Maribel Barrera, who helped develop and deliver the training vision
  • Course on Personal Data Human subjects in research Nicolas Dintzner (Data steward – Faculty Technology, Management and Policy), Santosh Ilamparuthi (Data steward – Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science), Cath Cotton (Policy Adviser TU Delft – Office Executive Board), Ingeborg Ahlers (Privacy Officer – TU Delft – Privacy Team), all participants in the feedback pilot (incl. data stewards, researchers and support staff)All those that contributed in preparing the training business case: Faculty data stewards, central graduate school, Marta Teperek, Alastair Dunning, Anke Versteeg, Nicole Will, Emmy Tsang, Pim van Schöll  from TU Delft Library and Meta Keijzer-de Ruijter and Julie Beardsell from ICT innovation. 
  • Maaike Smit who helped organise training and workshops

Data stewardship

  • Further growth of the data stewards team (a few faculties are now in the process of hiring/considering hiring) additional data stewards!
  • Successful adoption of the new ‘Data Steward’ UFO profile
  • Lookout for 2023:
    • Development of disciplinary guidelines for data management
    • Hiring a central data steward to strengthen the capacity of central coordination and support for data stewardship

People responsible for this work:

  • Yan Wang, leading these activities
  • Lies de Coninck, who helped with the assessment and implementation of the Data Steward UFO profile
  • Anke Versteeg, Amber Leeuwenburg, Andre Groenhof, Chantal Brokerhof, Myrthe van Nus, who helped with adopting the Data Steward UFO profile
  • Data Stewards Heather Andrews, Yasemin Turkilmas-van der Velden, Lora Armstrong, Nicolas Dintzner, Jeff Love, Esther Plomp, Diana Popa, Santosh Ilamparuthi, Arthur Newton, who contributed to the TUD Data Stewards task overview, part of the Data UFO profile assessment

Digital Competence Centre (DCC)

  • Development of a sustainability plan for the DCC based on successful engagement in long-term projects with the research community
  • Publication of the interactive DCC Dashboard which displays the DCC projects completed since 2019 and those currently in progress
  • Completion of 37 hands-on data and software projects with over 3350 hours spent in collaboration with research groups across at TU Delft
  • Tremendous success (and additional funding!) for the TU Delft R café initiative!
  • Lookout for 2023:
    • Evaluation of the UFO profiles of data managers and RSEs
    • Hiring two additional data managers to increase the capacity of the DCC

People responsible for this work:

  • Ashley Cryan and Aleksandra Wilczynska, who led data management aspects of the DCC team work and also initiated and are leading the R café initiative
  • Julie Beardsell, Coordinator of the DCC team and leading the development of sustainability plans
  • Other DCC members: Niket Agrawal,  Manuel Garcia Alvarez, Meta Keijzer-de Ruijter, Maurits Kok, Dennis Palagin, Jose Urra Llanusa