Towards cultural change in data management - data stewardship in practice | Software Sustainability Institute

"Late last month, I took a day trip to the Netherlands to attend an event at TU Delft entitled “Towards cultural change in data management – data stewardship in practice”. My Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship application “pitch” last year had been based around building bridges and sharing strategies and lessons between advocacy approaches for data and software management, and encouraging more holistic approaches to managing (and simply thinking about) research outputs in general. When I signed up for the event I expected it to focus exclusively on research data, but upon arrival at the venue (after a distressingly early start, and a power-walk from the train station along the canal) I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the post-lunch breakout sessions was on the topic of software reproducibility, so I quickly signed up for that one. I made it in to the main auditorium just in time to hear TU Delft’s Head of Research Data Services, Alastair Dunning, welcome us to the event. Alastair is a well-known face in the UK, hailing originally from Scotland and having worked at Jisc prior to his move across the North Sea. He noted the difference between managed and Open research data, a distinction that translates to research software too, and noted the risk of geographic imbalance between countries which are able to leverage openness to their advantage while simultaneously coping with the costs involved – we should not assume that our northern European privilege is mirrored all around the globe. The first keynote came from Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director of Scholarly Communication and Research Services at the University of Cambridge, whom I also know from a Research Data Management Forum event I organised last year in London. Danny’s theme was the role of research data management in demonstrating academic integrity, quality and credibility in an echo-chamber/social media world where deep, scholarly expertise itself is becoming (largely baselessly) distrusted. Obviously as more and more research depends upon software driven processing, what’s good for data is just as important for code when it comes to being able to reproduce or replicate research conclusions; an area currently in crisis, according to at least one high profile survey. One of Danny’s proposed solutions to this problem is to distribute and reward dissemination across the whole research lifecycle, not only attaching credit and recognition/respect to traditional publications, but also to datasets, code and other types of outputs...."