As an award recipient of the Beyond the PDF2 1K Challenge, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) hosted the first of a two-part program aimed at understanding how libraries can facilitate data management, data publication, reproducibility, and data reuse. The overall goal of this effort is to promote interaction between information scientists and research scientists to help define new strategies and goals for libraries in this emerging area.
Our Data Management Open House was held on October 9, 2013 and open to students, faculty, and staff. We discussed the outcomes of the Beyond the PDF2 conference, highlighting aspects of the data-research cycle in which there are issues surrounding reproducibility and scholarly communication of findings. We talked about how data management plays a central role in the research cycle – Starting at Ground Zero. We demonstrated how quality data management supports research reproducibility within and across labs, resource sharing and reuse, impact, data linking, scholarly attribution, and knowledge discovery. Happy hour refreshments were kindly provided by Elsevier Labs. The presentation is available here.
A diverse set of students, staff, and faculty from various departments at OHSU, including basic science, core laboratories, and clinical departments, attended the event. Despite this diversity, participants raised common issues and questions, such as how find and choose the best standard for their data, how to support file versioning, and how to apply metadata to facilitate data sharing. Conversation and feedback after the presentation centered around two themes: there is so much to know about how data should be managed and shared; and, they didn’t know the library was a place to go for help.
A second Starting at Ground Zero session will be held in the form of one-on-one consultations between OHSU Library staff members and individual researchers. Our goal is to help researchers with data management, application of metadata or data standards, data citation, and data publication. In hosting these sessions, we aim to gain an in-depth understanding of our local research data needs, that can be generalized to help libraries and the Force11 community better support a more sophisticated research data lifecycle. The first 16 recipients will receive a $50 award for participating as part of the 1K challenge funding.
More information is available here: https://www.force11.org/starting-at-ground-zero/
Contact: Melissa Haendel: haendel@ohsu.edu
Look for more reports of our activities at the Twitter hashtag: #OHSUdata
