SND’s first network meeting of the year focused on the research data workflow. There were 80 participants from 28 universities and university colleges plus the Swedish Research Council (VR) and SUNET. Elisabeth Strandhagen, collaborations lead at SND, commented:
“Our meetings are important forums for the exchange of information and discussions around the construction of the new SND. They provide an opportunity to get to know each other and to learn more about how this work is progressing at different institutions, which is essential for the success of this collaboration over the coming years.”
Practical examples from SLU and SU
Hanna Lindroos and Mikaela Asplund from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and Sabina Anderberg, Jeff Love and Joakim Philipson from Stockholm University (SU) shared examples of how their respective universities have worked with research data so far. SLU has carried out much of this work within the framework of TILDA, the university's IT system for archiving and publishing data from research and environmental analysis. SU has developed a variety of research support services for managing, storing, publishing and preserving research data. In June last year, SU’s Rector gave Stockholm University Library a specific assignment regarding research data. Within the framework of this assignment, a research data policy was developed and then adopted by SU at the beginning of March.
“We are very proud and happy that Stockholm University supports publicly funded research being as openly available as possible. The policy means that open science should be encouraged in practice and that supervisors are responsible for informing postgraduates and students about this,” said Sabina Anderberg.
Coordination role and future storage
The role of the Swedish Research Council (VR) in coordinating the promotion of open access to research data at the national level was another of the topics for the day. Karl Gertow from VR mentioned the creation an external reference group linked to this coordinating role. Another important aspect is how data management plans should be included, evaluated and followed up with regard to research applications. Coordination at the national and international level is required between different research funding organizations, and VR is participating in the harmonization discussions taking place in Science Europe.
The storage of research data is another important issue for the data management process. Leif Johansson from Sunet highlighted the need for a national platform for storage, as reflected in discussions Sunet has had with the Research Infrastructures in 2016 and 2017. This has led to a project to develop a solution whereby Sunet sells storage to higher education institutions or to larger research groups and infrastructures.
“The storage platform will be developed over the next few months, with support from a reference group and testing in a number of pilot projects. Then it is up to the universities and university colleges to decide how they want to approach this and exactly what they want,” said Leif Johansson.
Ongoing at SND
SND has worked intensively over recent months to start developing various types of services that will assist the work on managing research data at higher education institutions. ‘My SND’ is one of these services, a portal for researchers and Data Access Units (DAU) enabling them to fill in, manage, and review data descriptions. In the future, other features will be included in the service, such as a function enabling orders of research data. The network is currently testing a first version of ‘My SND’, and the plan is for the portal to launch at the end of March.
Ilze Lace and Jeremy Azzopardi from SND presented the work under way to produce a manual that will be a support for DAU-members in terms of the quality control of data and metadata provided by researchers. Another important issue raised was the distribution of responsibilities between researchers, DAUs, SND and other relevant stakeholders.
The next network meeting will be held in Gothenburg on Wednesday 11 July 2018.
"The idea is that the location of the meetings varies so that everyone in the network gets the chance to visit the seven universities that are a part of the SND consortium and hear more about their varying experiences and contexts," said Elisabeth Strandhagen.
Presentations from the network meeting are available here (Swedish only).