Plenary and group meetings report
This report draws on the Plenary and the group meetings that I have attended in Helsinki.
To elaborate on the current problems of the Early Career and Engagement Interest group (ECEIG), a meeting scheduled for the 23rd October set up the basis for a Mentoring programme. Experienced actors indicated an enthusiastic need for networking or mentoring and, expressed feelings of moral support to the idea of capturing the craft of know-how in need. Several participants described how working with and being mentored was central to their learning. The importance of matching faculty mentors and their students with similar characteristics was noted. Also, the impact of an electronic mentoring program on students in lower socioeconomic areas was stressed. This analysis has helped to better define the role of the mentor and provided a framework with which to identify how can we have a Mentoring Programme that would be based upon a group of advisors that are all in RDA.
RDA community members discussed how to refine available RDA outputs material under effective disseminating protocols, along the “BoF – Improving Available RDA Outputs Material to Enhance Use and Impact” session. Major data sharing concerns trust and openness, that is why the barriers to adoption of RDA recommendations are expressed in terms of benefits for agents who get on with the job. Willingness for training could be associated with methods of disseminating RDA recommendations. To engage the community in improving key recommendations under the umbrella of RDA, Group 1 underlined the need for an increased awareness regarding the close connection between them and the requirements for data sharing in OA mode.
The anecdotes, technical bits and pieces, lots of photographs and pages included in web Notebooks, were the subject of the “Management of Computational Notebooks BoF” group meeting. The use of FAIR is publicly available for Notebooks, through which they can be used to develop and implement as a reusable personal resource. The presentations built on the general availability of Jupyter in large scientific computer facilities. To cite the notebooks after the software citation principles, a discussion on harvesting the filenames, folder names and file structure from the notebooks that are used at work was also established. These activity-based questions were tested with more emphasis in four group activities. Publishing laboratory notebooks is given a thought to a serious gap (sense-making gap). There are opportunities for notes and diagrams in notebooks as a form of enter into a software model embodied information, or translating it into document form, which can be unfolded later. Tracking the evaluation of research groups, to understand the central or intermittent role of publishing notebooks could reveal a change in the division of labour among the laboratory scientists (eg, juniors vs seniors), Furnishing this information often turns in more specialized knowledge to produce and distribute notebooks, and therefore the RDA community could earn published notebooks recognition in science social words. Next, further steps could be to characterize how much in need of publication are the laboratory notebooks required to establish the context of their citation.
Institutional policies regarding the digital repositories, were discussed by “Repository Platforms for Research Data group” session. Managing and evaluating digital repositories have had an evolution in light of current practices of this IG. The session focused on the unique role of the digital repository manager and help training the growing numbers of professionals engaged in conversation. A number of technical architectures in support of data policies occupied the discussion topics, that were divided based on different groups. The elements concerning stakeholder interests and potential conflicts involved in the creation and evolution of data policies pertaining to repository management, had their own priority into one of the groups.
The program of the “CODATA-RDA IG on Legal Interoperability group” session addressed the structures and conflicts between license-based and open publishing models. The problem of standardization is compromising and the incorporation of licenses' classification listing required, it was said. Mixed licenses are in need as far as licenses often did not give permission for inter-library lending and, thus, make the digital divide grow even further. Researching user experience on JISC Open Research Hub represent an important model in scholars information behaviour where the state of the rights are encompassed by mixed licenses and access.
The "BoF: Engaging Researchers With Research Data: What Works?" session emphasized that to encourage scientists to fight for their data it must be understood how they behave in the context of using and sharing research data in OA mode. Best practices were exchanged on the collection, analysis and interpretation of research data under bureaucratic hurdles and budgetary control policies.
"PID: It's All About the Metadata!" session associated metadata elements for information management with the most obvious place where appropriate content identifiers must be. The platforms which provide persistent identifiers and technical support exposed their editorial work and website maintenance problems.
The overall "Intelligence Data Fabric" session brought together several research directions under way in that fascinating cloud architecture. It was concentrated on empirical questions that stay in the background of this technology data management ecosystem.