RDM Weekly - Issue 054
A weekly roundup of Research Data Management resources.
Welcome to Issue 54 of the RDM Weekly Newsletter!
The content of this newsletter is divided into 4 categories:
✅ What’s New in RDM?
These are resources that have come out within the last year or so
✅ Oldies but Goodies
These are resources that came out over a year ago but continue to be excellent ones to refer to as needed
✅ Research Data Management Job Opportunities
Research data management related job opportunities that I have come across in the past week
✅ Just for Fun
A data management meme or other funny data management content
What’s New in RDM?
Resources from the past year
1. A Milestone for Open Science: 500 Packages in the World Bank’s Reproducible Research Repository
The Reproducible Research Repository (RRR) is the public-facing platform of the World Bank’s Reproducible Research Initiative, which builds on the World Bank’s broader commitment to open data and open knowledge. This month, the World Bank’s RRR published its 500th reproducibility package—a milestone for open science and research transparency. Until a few years ago, finding the data and code behind a World Bank publication could be difficult: data citations were scarce, and code files, if published at all, were scattered across journal repositories, GitHub, and personal websites. RRR was created to change that by providing a single home for reproducibility packages associated with World Bank Group publications. As they mark this milestone, this article reflects on what the first 500 packages have taught us about making research more transparent, accessible, and reproducible in practice. The article also links to several public facing resources including a checklist for their reproducibility packages and a README generator.
2. From DAS to Deposit: Navigating Publisher Data Policies
If you have submitted a paper in the last few years, you have probably been asked for a Data Availability Statement (DAS). What that request means, however, varies widely. Some journals treat open data as a condition of publication. Others mainly want a statement, while leaving deposit optional or journal-dependent. A smaller group still has little more than encouragement, or no dedicated research-data policy at all. To make that landscape usable, the authors started from the CHORUS Publisher Data Availability Policies Index. CHORUS maintains a regularly updated list of publisher and journal data-availability policy pages, which is practical and broad enough to cover major commercial publishers, academic societies, and open-research platforms in one place. They coded every unique entry on that index into three groups by what authors must actually do: hard open-data mandates, mainstream DAS/tiers, and optional or no policy. Learn more about the groups in this resource.
3. filetree R package
filetree is an R package for declarative filetrees with filename validation and parsing. The package lets you define rules for how a project's folders and files should be named and organized, then automatically checks real directories against those rules. It’s built for people who have many files, that should be nested within a consistent folder structure. You describe each level of the folder hierarchy (for instance subject → date → data file) with simple templates, and the package flags any files that don't match your prescribed conventions.
4. Beyond Familiarity and Tradition: Software Choice in Psychology Statistics Courses Has Long-Term Implications for Research Skills and Open Science Practices
Software choice in psychology statistics courses remains debated. The long-term impact of software choice on researchers’ own use is unknown. This article sought to identify which statistical software researchers commonly used and the reasons for its use, with a particular focus on the extent to which use was related to what participants were formally taught. Psychology researchers from Canada and the United States (N=311) filled out an online survey asking about their statistical software use, preferences, and reasons for use. We conducted a content analysis to identify themes related to the use of specific software programs. The study finds that reasons for using statistical software differ based on the program, with a strong contrast between familiarity-based use (SPSS) and capacity-driven use (R).
5. Women as the First Open Scientists: Five Stories of the Neglected Contributions of Women in (Social) Science Reform History
Recent years have seen growing emphasis on “Open Science,” a movement to enhance research transparency, robustness, and accountability. Prompted by concerns over fraud, questionable research practices, and low reproducibility in psychological research that emerged in the 2010s, Open Science has been framed by some dominant advocates as a new approach to research in psychology and across the social sciences. However, women in social science have long practiced and promoted principles now hailed as innovative, although their contributions are often left out of mainstream narratives. This erasure is troubling, especially as feminist scholars have critiqued the increasingly exclusionary culture of mainstream science reform. This article traces the overlooked contributions of five pioneering women: Mary Whiton Calkins and her replication efforts in the 1890s; Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley, who advocated for analytical precision in the 1910s; Alice Bryan’s 1940s adversarial collaboration; Carolyn Wood Sherif’s metascientific work in the 1960s; and Leonore Tiefer’s promotion of conflict-of-interest declarations of sex research in the 2000s. The author documents how their contributions laid the intellectual foundations of what is now contemporary Open Science in the social sciences.
6. How to Share Qualitative Data - Seminar
Join The University of Sheffield Library on July 22nd, 1-2 PM BST via Google Meet where Dr Jenni Adams (University of Sheffield / MORPHSS project) will share three key strategies on how: Granular consent forms support different levels of openness and identifiability; Integrating processual consent strategies accommodate project dynamics; and Sharing transcripts with participants help build consensus on the content and presentation of the data. They will also explore situations in the context of debates around informed consent in the literature around qualitative data sharing.
7. Accessibility for Data and Data Repositories: Understanding and Applying the 2024 ADA Title II Rule
This report aims to support research data professionals and their institutions with the task of working to make repositories and the data in them digitally accessible. The report will help them understand the requirements from the rules, their implications, and the work and changes they may require. The report emphasizes that repository and data accessibility should not be an afterthought, but a fundamental part of the research lifecycle. The report prepared by the Research Data Access & Preservation (RDAP) Association's Digitally Accessible Data and Data Repositories Working Group.
Oldies but Goodies
Older resources that are still helpful
1. Are Commitments to Open Data Policies Worth the Paper They are Written On?
In this 2024 blog post Dorothy Bishop argues that open-data policies often prove hollow when tested, citing a Nature Communications superconductivity paper where physicist J. E. Hirsch spent over a year being stonewalled after requesting data behind an inconsistency he'd spotted, even though Nature's policy requires sharing, and Max Planck (whose researchers co-authored the paper) has its own open-data commitments. She argues vague "available on reasonable request" statements really mean "not available" and that refusing a simple request just makes things look more suspicious. Her conclusion: if institutions won't enforce their policies, they should stop claiming to have them.
2. Implementing Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) Principles in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Research: Mixed Methods Approach
The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles are a guideline to improve the reusability of data. However, properly implementing these principles is challenging due to a wide range of barriers. To further the field of FAIR data, this study aimed to systematically identify barriers regarding implementing the FAIR principles in the area of child and adolescent mental health research, define the most challenging barriers, and provide recommendations for these barriers.
3. How to Name Files Like a Normie
In this slide deck from Jenny Bryan, she provides guidance on naming files in a way that allows them to be both machine and human readable. Ultimately her core message is to just pick a consistent convention and stick to it, since any sensible convention beats none.
4. How to Export Analysis-Ready Survey Data
This blog post makes the case for designing data collection tools with the end result in mind, rather than fixing messy data after the fact. Using Qualtrics as an example, it walks through how to let your data dictionary guide the build (from variable naming to validation rules), so the data that comes out matches what you actually planned to collect. The upfront investment in planning pays for itself many times over in cleaning time saved.
Research Data Management Job Opportunities
These are data management job opportunities that I have seen posted in the last week. I have no affiliation with these organizations.
The Jed Foundation - Senior Data Management Specialist (Remote)
Appalachian State University - Research Data Librarian and Institutional Repository Manager
Alfred Wegener Institute - PANGAEA Data Curator in Data Resilience Project
Just for Fun
Sponsor
This newsletter is supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute Of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R25HD114368. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Read more about the NIH Data Management for Data Sharing Workshop Project.
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