Tagged: Policy

Another year over!

Author: Esther Plomp

tl;dr: Overview of 2022 for Esther Plomp.

For 2021 I wrote an extensive overview of what I did, which I found a helpful process. I also got motived to do this again thanks to Yanina and Danielle with their overviews. So here we go again!

January

Last January I started with my activities for the PhD duration team at the Faculty of Applied Science. The team consists of myself, Ans van Schaik (Faculty Graduate School) and Pascale Daran-Lapujade (director of the Faculty Graduate School). This year we set up a procedure to reduce the PhD duration (PhD-in-4 policy). This procedure required a communication plan (for which I gave an interview – as in house expert on taking too long on your PhD..).

I also gave a crash course on Open Science, together with Emmy Tsang (then Community Engagement manager at the TU Delft Library). This included a presentation on Open Data (made in R Markdown!).

The participants of the AIMOS discussion session wrote up their experiences in a blogpost ‘Moving Open Science forward at the institutional/departmental level’. I repeated this session in March for the Open Science Barcamp, which is summarized in another blog.

And I presented on Sharing Mortuary Data!

February

Last February I started with mentoring activities for the Carpentries and Open Life Science. This year I continued this for Open Life Science and co-mentored Adarsh Kalikadien, together with Maurits Kok from the Digital Competence Center. The Faculty of Applied Sciences continues to provide PhD candidates that participate in Open Life Science with credits (read more on intranet). Later this year I had the honour of co-mentoring Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal, with Fotis Psomopoulos.

In February we also started with our Faculty’s Publication Task Force. We had two main goals:

  1. What journals does our Faculty publish in?
  2. Raising awareness of (sustainable) Open Access options that researchers at our Faculty have

As part of my efforts for The Turing Way, more information on data articles was added. Many Turing Way Community members contributed, as well as Lora Armstrong (Data Steward CitG).

March

I was invited by the 3mE PhD council to talk about Metrics in academia, based on a blog that I co-wrote with Emmy Tsang and Antonio Schettino in 2021. In July I co-organised a similar session on Metrics in Academia with the Applied Science Faculty’s PhD council.

I had the honour to be one of the panellists of ‘The Turing Way Fireside Chat: Emergent Roles in Research Infrastructure & Technology’.

April

This month marked the official start of our Faculty’s Open Science Team! This team consists of at least a member of each of the Faculty’s departments (Flore Kruiswijk, Jean Marc Daran, Xuehang Wang, Sebastian Weingärtner, Sabrina Meindlhumer, Anton Akhmerov). This year we discussed how to increase awareness of Open Science and how to determine the focus of every department is for the upcoming years. Each of the team members engaged their department in a discussion or send out a survey in the months October-December. We will discuss the results with the Faculty management team in the next year.

I gave a lightening talk on The Turing Way for the Collaborations Workshop 2022 (save the date for 2023!).

Together with Zafer Öztürk, I discussed my experiences as a Data Steward for the Essentials 4 Data course. I wrote a summary of my Data Steward Journey in a blogpost.

I was on the FAIR data podcast and discussed several things FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) that I’m involved in with Rory Macneil. (Can recommend to reach out to Rory if you have anything FAIR to discuss!)

Together with Chris Stantis we organised an IsoArcH workshop on responsible data sharing.

Thanks to Valerie Aurora, I was able to follow the Ally Skills train-the-trainer workshop.

May

Our article on Taking the TU Delft Carpentries Workshops Online was published and was one of the most popular articles that month in JeSLIB!

I was involved in several presentations:

June

In June I gave a repeat of the Data Management Plan workshop for the DCC Spring Training Days.

I was involved as a Subject Matter Expert for Open Data for TOPS (Transform to Open Science).

And I presented the ‘Open Science Buffet’ poster for the Faculty of Applied Sciences Science Day.

Next to this, I followed a training on change management. This was very helpful in my efforts for the Open Science & PhD duration teams.

July

For the TU Delft BioDay I presented two posters on Open Science (the Buffet one mentioned earlier and one on the Open Life Science programme).

I was one of the panellist of the IFLA open data infrastructures panel organised by Emmy Tsang.

July was the month where I started to record the things that I am saying no to (since tracking things motivates me to actually work on them!). I also managed to get corona in August..

August

In August I learned how to use Quarto by making the materials of the RDM 101 course available online. I’m organising a faculty version of this course in March 2023.

I co-organised one of the workshops by The Turing Way for Carpentry Con: Git Good: Using GitHub for Collaboration in Open Open Source Communities. Many thanks to Anne Lee Steele, Hari Sood and Sophia Batchelor for this collaboration!

Together with Yan Wang we presented on Data Stewardship at TU Delft for a swissuniversities webinar.

September

Co-organised a session on FAIR discussions for the VU Open Science Festival, for which we’re currently writing a checklist article.

I described my career trajectory in an interview for the NWO magazine.

Presented a poster on the Removing Barriers to Reproducible Research work I did with Emma Karoune for the BABAO 2022 conference.

September was a busy article month:

Also, my husband defended his thesis!

October

I attended the NWO BioPhysics conference, where I coordinated the data/software workshop ‘Plan ahead: practical tools to make your data and software more FAIR’. We gave a similar workshop in May for NWOlife2022.

I gave an invited talk on Open Science for the Tools, Practices and Systems programme. The presentation was based on the blogpost : ‘Open Science should not be a hobby‘ (written in May).

November

I again participated in AcWriMo (write 500 words each day for blogs, articles etc, based on the novel writing month NaNoWriMo). (I learned from last year and did not include a drawing each day…)

I gave my first in person Ally Skills training for the How are You week. There may be more of that in the upcoming years!

November is also the month for the second The Turing Way Book Dash. This (currently mostly online) event takes place over four days in May and November. Participants contribute to The Turing Way during the event and join social discussions related to data science. I reviewed a lot of pull requests! Thanks to my AcWriMo I managed to write something on Cultural Change, Code Review for journals, updating the RDM checklist, and Open Peer Review.

I also met the team of Young Science in Transition in person for the first time!

I followed a course on policy writing. This has hopefully improved my writing.

The article I co-wrote with Emma Karoune, on Removing Barriers to Reproducible Research in Archaeology, got recommended!

I also finalised my review activities for swissuniversities’ Open Research Data calls.

November was again the busiest month for researcher requests (n=27), comparable to last year (n=26). In total I had 196 requests this year, a bit lower compared to 2021 (n=211), but more than 2020 (n = 186).

And I managed to figure out how Mastodon works (follow me @toothFAIRy@scholar.social)

December

I used December to recover from November, and round up some things for the year. This included updating the Open Science Support Website, which now has over 72 posts that answer frequently asked questions by researchers. Not all posts are finalised, and feedback is always welcome.

I’d also like to add a couple of things that I didn’t manage this year: Work on some of the older research data management survey data, reach inbox zero, write an article based on one of my thesis chapters, and get through my to-do list. I guess we have 2023 for that!

Happy New Year!

PS: check this Mastodon thread for my favourite books of 2022.

Managing and Sharing Data in 2021

Authors: Esther Plomp

NWO/Horizon Europe projects have the following requirements:

Data management should follow the FAIR principles to maximise the effectiveness and reproducibility of the research undertaken. 

  • The FAIR principles recommend that scientific data are: 
    • ‘Findable’ thanks to their persistent identifier that is assigned to your dataset when it is shared using a data repository (see below).
    • ‘Accessible’ so that the data and metadata can be examined; FAIR data is not necessarily open data, but the metadata could still be shared to ensure that the data is still FAIR.
    • ‘Interoperable’ so that comparable data can be analysed and integrated through the use of common vocabulary and formats.
    • ‘Reusable’ as a result of appropriate documentation and provision of a license that tells others what they can do with the data. 
Illustration by The Turing Way/Scriberia

Proposals

Data Management Plans

Data Management Plans (DMP) are required for projects funded by NWO (within four months after the awarding of the grant) and Horizon Europe (within 6 months of the project’s start). 

  • DMP templates are available on the websites of NWO and Horizon Europe, as well as on the platform DMPonline that you can use with your netID. 
    • DMPonline has TU Delft specific guidance that will help you to set up your DMP more efficiently. 
    • You can also use the TU Delft template available through DMPonline (although this will need some additions for Horizon Europe as this template is more extensive). It is especially efficient to use the TU Delft template if your project needs HREC approval (for example, working with personal data).
  • A DMP should be a living document, which is updated as the project evolves. Horizon Europe expects you to update the template throughout the project.

Data sharing

Data should be shared through a trusted repository, for example: 4TU.ResearchData.

  • Data underpinning a scientific publication should be deposited at the latest at the time of publication.
  • Data is in principle open, unless restricted access is needed for legitimate reasons
    • Access can be restricted when it concerns aspects such as privacy, public security, ethical limitations, property rights and commercial interest.
  • For Horizon Europe, the data should be licensed using CC-BY or CC0 (or an equivalent license), and metadata of the datasets should be CC0 licensed. 
    • For CC-BY it means that others should cite the work when they reuse the data. 
    • CC0 waives any rights, with citation still being expected as this follows best scientific practises. 
    • Note that some Horizon Europe calls may require additional obligations for the validations of scientific publications. 
  • These requirements are in line with the TU Delft Research Data Framework Policy, stating that “research data, code and any other materials needed to reproduce research findings are appropriately documented and shared in a research data repository in accordance with the FAIR principles for at least 10 years from the end of the research project, unless there are valid reasons not to do so.” (NWO also expects data preservation for at least ten years, unless legal provisions or discipline-specific guidelines dictate otherwise). 
Illustration by The Turing Way/Scriberia

Software

Software is seen as a separate research output from data:

  • Horizon Europe recommends sharing software (under an Open Source license).
  • NWO expects that software that is needed to access and interpret the data is made available, following the Five Recommendations for FAIR Software.
  • See the TU Delft Research Software Policy for more information on how to share your research software. 
    • TU Delft encourages you to share your code/software through 4TU.ResearchData choosing one of the TU Delft approved licenses (Apache, MIT, BSD, EUPL, AGPL, LGPL, GPL, CC0). You can also choose another data repository, such as Zenodo, but then you have to ensure that the output is correctly registered in PURE yourself. See the TU Delft Guidelines on Research Software or this recording for more information on sharing your software/code.

Need any help? 

Resources

Horizon Europe Programme Guide (pages 41 – 46)
Annotated Horizon Europe Grant Agreement (Annex 5, pages 152-153)
NWO: Research Data Management
TU Delft: Research Data Management
TU Delft & Faculty policies (data/software)

Draft Working Version of TU Delft Research Data Framework Policy

The TU Delft Research Data Framework Policy is currently going through the necessary wheels before its final ratification

Below is the current version currently being reviewed by stakeholders.

  • 15th May – Discussion by Heads of University Department
  • 5th June – Discussion with The Graduate School over implementation for PhDs
  • 26th June – Final presentation (and hopefully adoption) to the College van Bestuur.
  • July onwards – Faculties begin work on their own faculty policies