I occasionally post about "RDM" (research data management), an activity that has recently become a formalised essential part of the research processes. I say recently formalised, since researchers have of course kept research notebooks recording their activities and their data since the dawn of science, but not always in an open and transparent manner. The desirability of doing so was revealed by the 2009 "Climategate" events. In the UK, Climategate was apparently the catalyst which persuaded the funding councils (such as the EPSRC, the Royal Society, etc) to formulate policies which required all their funded researchers to adopt the principles of RDM by May 2015 and in their future researches. An early career researcher here, anxious to conform to the funding body instructions, sent me an email a few days ago asking about one aspect of RDM which got me thinking.
The question related to the divide between data as a separate research object (and which therefore has to be managed), and data as an inseparable part of the article narrative, which is of course ostensibly managed by the journal publication processes. Such data may often be the description of a process rather than simply tables of numbers or graphs. In chemistry it may include chemical names and chemical terms as part of an experimental procedure. For one nice illustration of such embedded data, go look at the chemical tagger page. Here the data is blending with the semantics, and the two are not easily separated. So, when such separation is not easily achieved, should the specific processes required by RDM as illustrated in the five bullet points below actually be followed?
So, should step 2 be included if the data itself is inextricably intertwined with the narrative and cannot be separated? The slightly surprising advice I would suggest is yes! And the answer is that it IS possible to generate metadata (data about the, possibly entwined, data) which CAN be processed in such a step. What forms would such metadata take?
So items such as 6-14 can be collected and sent to e.g. DataCite with a DOI received in return as part of item 2 of the RDM processes. No "pure" data need be involved, only metadata. Nonetheless such metadata can only increase the visibility and discoverability of the research, as illustrated in how such metadata can be searched for the components described above.
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