LEARN Workshop: Embedding Research Data as part of the research cycle

I attended the first (of a proposed five) workshops organised by LEARN (an EU-funded project that aims to ...Raise awareness in research data management (RDM) issues & research policy) on Friday. Here I give some quick bullet points relating to things that caught my attention and or interest. The program (and Twitter feed) can be found at https://learnrdm.wordpress.com where other's comments can also be seen. 

  • Henry Oldenburg, founder member and first secretary of the Royal Society, was the first Open Scientist.
  • About 100 people attended the workshop. Of these ~3-5 identified themselves as researchers creating data, and the rest comprised research data managers, administrators, librarians, publishers (but see below) etc. Many were new to their posts.
  • Not publishing scientific data should become recognised as scientific malpractice.
  • Central libraries should pro-actively disperse their knowledge to data scientists in departments.
  • If a scientist is concerned that openly publishing their data might give advantage to their competitors, they are urged to counteract this by "being cleverer than the others". 
  • The three great bastions of open science are (a) Open Data, (b) Open access articles and (c) doing science openly. Examples of this third category include open notebook science (ONS), a form notably pioneered by Jean-Claude Bradley. One attribute of ONS was noted as no insider knowledge.
  • Learned societies should endow medals for Open Science.
  • (Some) publishers are reinventing themselves as Research Facilitators.

The plenaries are all well worth dipping into (certainly the video and in some cases all the slides are scheduled to appear).

If you are a researcher (undergraduate students, PGs, PDRAs, early career researchers and academics) you should immediately track down your local evangelist/expert in RDM and ask what the local infrastructures are (or will be shortly built). 

Henry Rzepa

Henry Rzepa is Emeritus Professor of Computational Chemistry at Imperial College London.

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  • Videos for three of the four plenary speakers are now available at http://learn-rdm.eu/workshops/1st-learn-workshop/videos/

    The 4th speaker was every bit as insightful as the other three and I hope this recording also becomes available shortly.

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Henry Rzepa
Tags: Academic publishingChemical ITEuropean Unionfirst Open Scientistfirst secretaryFree culture movementHenry OldenburgJean Claude BradleyOpen accessOpen dataOpen scienceRDMResearchresearcherRoyal SocietyScienceScientific methodScientific misconductscientistTechnology/Internet
8 years ago

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