Data sharing in Chemistry: A data steward’s perspective

“I’m a data stew­ard at Eind­hoven Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy work­ing in the depart­ments of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing & Chem­istry and the Built Envi­ron­ment. 

The Chem­istry depart­ment is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing from a research data man­age­ment  (RDM) per­spec­tive as most research groups have a struc­tured way of work­ing and have already adopt­ed good basic RDM prac­tices. How­ev­er, open access pub­lish­ing of research data in data repos­i­to­ries is a prac­tice that’s not wide­ly embraced as a default way of work­ing. 

Part­ly, the reluc­tance stems from the con­cern that ‘it’s too much work to make data FAIR’. How to deal with deposit­ing repro­ducible data with rich doc­u­men­ta­tion, and how to use ontolo­gies and (domain-spe­cif­ic) meta­da­ta schemas in order to com­ply with the FAIR prin­ci­ples is a com­mon top­ic of dis­cus­sion among chem­istry researchers. 

Researchers work­ing in chem­istry and relat­ed dis­ci­plines often state that ‘pub­lish­ing data does not have much added val­ue because all the data is already in the Sup­port­ing Infor­ma­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle’. And, pub­lish­ing up to 50–100 pages of Sup­port­ing Infor­ma­tion is not unusu­al in their dis­ci­plines. 

Nev­er­the­less, slow­ly but sure­ly researchers are start­ing to use data repos­i­to­ries, such as 4TU.ResearchData to pub­lish their data and it’s reas­sur­ing to see that such datasets often obtain dozens or hun­dreds of views and down­loads in a rel­a­tive­ly short time. I hope the prac­tice of pub­lish­ing data  con­tin­ues to gain trac­tion among the chem­istry research com­mu­ni­ty and that it erad­i­cates  any feel­ings of ‘cold feet’ they get when it comes to shar­ing data open­ly. 

A sig­nif­i­cant part of my work as a data stew­ard con­sists of deliv­er­ing train­ing  ses­sions or giv­ing pre­sen­ta­tions about RDM to research groups. I also reg­u­lar­ly engage with  indi­vid­ual researchers to explain what fun­der guide­lines on RDM and FAIR data mean in prac­tice and how to trans­late tech­ni­cal FAIR jar­gon into ‘doable’ actions. In addi­tion, I inform them about the time invest­ment and tech­ni­cal pro­fi­cien­cy required to make data FAIR; and, demon­strate how pub­lish­ing data in a repos­i­to­ry can help make their data FAIR in a sim­ple and effi­cient way.. Help­ing researchers write data man­age­ment plans and data para­graphs is anoth­er impor­tant com­po­nent of my work. Ques­tions from researchers are very diverse, rang­ing from ques­tions about Open Sci­ence in gen­er­al to more spe­cif­ic RDM top­ics, such as choos­ing data and soft­ware licens­es, pub­lish­ing and copy­right, etc.  

Luck­i­ly, our depart­men­tal project offi­cer, Gabriela Dima (who also serves as a part-time data stew­ard), and the Chem­istry Board, have been sup­port­ive of efforts to intro­duce improved RDM prac­tices with­in the depart­ment. The board also approved a depart­men­tal RDM pol­i­cy to pro­vide researchers with guid­ance on the RDM aspi­ra­tions with­in the depart­ment. 

From a data steward’s per­spec­tive, it may not always feel like things are mov­ing fast but if I com­pare pre­sen­ta­tions on RDM from 3 years ago and now, it’s clear that the aware­ness of RDM and open­ness of research prac­tice is increas­ing year by year, which is encour­ag­ing!”

Author: Sjef Öllers (Eind­hoven Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy)
Edi­tor: Con­nie Clare (4TU.ResearchData)