Posted by Lavanya Asokan (Apr 19, 2017)

 

Over 80 persons including NTU faculty, research staff, PhD students, administrative staff as well as a few from external research institutions took time from their busy work on 10 Mar 2017 to hear from by Mr Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre (UK) about “Open Access Research Data Sharing: Why does it matter? How does it benefit you?”.

The talk highlighted interesting data reuse stories, data curation, importance of data management, public and research community benefits, practices around the world and costs involved, resource allocation for open access data sharing. The speaker also shared about the positive impact of working openly and publishing data.

The audience was busy with their mobile devices while Mr Ashley was speaking. They were typing their questions on an online platform sli.do.com in response to what they hear from him. Kevin took time to respond to each and every of the 16 questions at appropriate junctures during the talk.

Library provided lunch to everyone who came. Most of the participants shared with us after the talk that they have gained a better understanding of open access research data sharing.

Click HERE to access the slides presented during the talk.

Click here to have a look at the 16 questions:

1. Do you feel that researchers, especially those in early stage of their career are resistant to share data because there is a lack of formal recognition?

2. In your experience, have you encountered universities with competitive instead of collaborative culture and how do you foster collaboration in such context?

3. Data Sharing is more prevalent in some fields than others. What are some key reasons /ways this can be emulated in other fields.

4. Data destruction – We can't possibly know what data can be useful many decades later like in the case of the shipping logs?

5. What are the boundaries of open access data sharing?

6. What are the barriers to open access research data sharing? How to overcome them?

7. Data sharing is good but DMP is too much bureaucratic work. Why is this necessary?

8. What's the best way to convince researcher who has reservation in data sharing? Esp those in highly competitive discipline.

9. This is more a question for the library: is there a secure server in NTU for the collection of data and back up of data while we are conducting research?

10. In your experience, have you encountered universities with competitive instead of collaborative culture, and how do you foster collaboration in such context?

11. In some research, we deal with human subjects (& their consent). What can NTU IRB do for those who are considering sharing beyond the scope of current project?

12. Is there a guide that has a master list of digital archives available for all disciplines? So that researchers can go to the guide to and find data for reuse.

13. Data management (digital curation/sharing) is normally driven at national level (eg UK, US & Australia). What is the likelihood for one to occur here?

14. How does open access address PDPA policy (Especially on the part that personal data is not to be moved out of Singapore)?

15. What research data do I need to share?

16.What is open access?