Data Infrastructures and Open Science

A video recording of this event is available on the DIJ YouTube channel

Abstracts and speakers

Miho Funamori

Who owns research data at universities?—An analysis of research data management practices at world universities

Research data—any data that are collected, processed, analyzed during research activity—are commonly perceived to be under full control by the researcher who has collected and used the data for research output purposes. Thus, researchers claim full control and right over the handling of their data. However, there are other perspectives to be taken care of from the university management side. The university needs to take responsibility in case of research misconduct. Publicly-funded research outputs shouldn’t be kept closed by individual researchers. Researcher cannot share data beyond their life. An institution can provide data infrastructure which would support the researcher’s research activity and enhance the institution’s research strength at the same time. This presentation—the insights derived from analysis of research data management practices and research data policies from world universities—takes the audience through the emerging role of university management and shared governance on research data within a university.

Miho Funamori is associate professor and strategy manager at the Research Center for Open Science and Data Platform at the National Institute of Informatics in Japan. She produces policy analysis of global trends of higher education and scholarly communication and gives advice on strategic decisions within NII and beyond. She is invited to seminars to lecture on e-journal issues, research data management and policies, research assessments, and other issues universities face in the 21st century. She has authored “Recommendations for Research Data Management at Academic Institutions” (2019) and “Guideline for Drafting University Research Data Policy” (2021) on behalf of AXIES, which is a society of CIOs at Japanese universities. She specializes in international higher education policy and university management and is an expert in the higher education sphere domestically and internationally. She has been Board Director of FORCE11 since 2019—a community to discuss the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship. Prior to joining the academia, she has worked at the Office for International Cooperation, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and Science and Technology Unit, Mitsubishi Research Institute.

Jeroen Sondervan

Notions on the differences in form and speed of the transformation to Open Science in Europe: with special reference to experiences at Utrecht University

We are witnessing a major transition and reform of the academic world to a space where open science is increasingly becoming the norm. In the recently published UNESCO recommendation, it can be read that open science aims to “make scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone, to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefits of science and society, and to open the processes of scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and communication to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community”. The transition towards open science comes in many and various ways. In the last five years in Europe, we’ve seen national and institutional open science policies appear in several countries. These policies are to support open science practices, like open access publishing and research data sharing. Another important development, and part of several of these policies, is the reform of rewarding and recognition structures of researchers and their research, e.g., just recently Utrecht University announced that the university will also evaluate faculty and staff members by their commitment to open science. This presentation will give a concise overview of the state of affairs regarding open science policy developments in Europe and will take the developments at Utrecht University as an example where open science is now fully integrated in the strategic ambitions of the university for the next five year. 

Jeroen Sondervan is open access publishing consultant for Utrecht University. He has over 14 years of experience working in scholarly publishing. From 2007 until 2016 he worked as a commissioning editor for Amsterdam University Press. From 2015 and onwards he works as an open access publishing consultant for Utrecht University. In 2019 he was appointed as open access project leader within the UU Open Science program for three years. He is a member of the Knowledge Exchange Open Access Group, the Dutch library consortium OA working group and editor of the national platform openaccess.nl. On a voluntary basis he is a member of the steering committee of MediArXiv, a preprint server for media and communication studies. Twitter handle: @Jeroenson.

Helmuth Trischler

Why and how should we establish research data infrastructures in the historical sciences? Recent initiatives in Germany

The last couple of years have witnessed a rising awareness for the need of digital information services and research data infrastructures both in the sciences and the humanities across the board. In Germany, the field of history has been slow in embarking on the transition towards digitization for quite some time. Meanwhile however, digital history has developed into a rapidly expanding field with new concepts and opportunities opening up. The digital transition requires new information services and research data infrastructures beyond the level of project funding. This paper will present recent initiatives to create such infrastructure according to the FAIR principles in Germany. While financially robust on the national level, these infrastructures are to be conceptualized and established in close collaboration with international partners.

Helmuth Trischler is Head of Research at the Deutsches Museum, Professor of Modern History and History of Technology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Co-Director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. He is jointly heading with Klaus Ceynova, Director of the Bavarian State Library, the Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies funded since 2016 by the German Research Foundation. He is also one of the co-applicants of NFDI4Memory, a sub-consortium for historically oriented research of the national research data infrastructure in the making. In addition, he is speaker of KultSam – Cultural Collections as Repositories for Research, Teaching and Education, a consortium that aims to establish an innovative research infrastructure for collections. 

This event is part of the MWS Web Forum Series on The Digital Transformation.