As has been our tradition since 2018, we are thrilled to publish a Special Issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship to celebrate another great Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP) Summit. The 2024 RDAP Summit, Bridging Boundaries: Interoperability in the Data Community, was a rousing success, taking place between March 12th and 14th, 2024. In keeping with recent tradition, this year’s summit was again held virtually via Pheedloop. As is the case with past summits, presentation recordings, slides and posters are available via OSF in the 2024 RDAP Summit archive.
This year’s Special Issue includes six articles based on presentations held at the 2024 RDAP Summit. Each of these articles focuses on different and interesting topics, providing an overview of the various issues and challenges currently facing the research data management field.
In the first full-length paper, Matthew Mayernik, Andrew Johnson, Renaine Julian, Matthew Murray, Claudius Mundoma, Aditya Ranganath, and Greg Stossmeister write about “Persistent Identifiers for Instruments and Facilities: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities.” This article introduces a novel use for persistent identifiers, in the tracking of scientific instruments and facilities. By bringing together various stakeholder groups, the FAIR Instruments and Facilities Research Coordination Network spent time over the past year hosting online focus groups, conducting informal discussion and conference presentations, and held two in-person workshops to develop four main topics for further exploration. The rest of the project will be spent on developing recommendations and best practices based on those four topics.
Isabella Baxter, Erin Antognoli, Paria Aria, Maggie Albro, Jocelyn Boice, Michal McCullough, and Carolyn Jackson from the Agriculture Network Information Collaborative (AgNIC) Data Working Group write about “Data Sharing Practices in Agricultural Research: Findings from a Systematized Review” in the second full-length paper. They analyzed the ways in which agricultural researchers from their institutions have shared research data over the past several years. Not only did their analysis show that over three-quarters of the included papers did not share their data, it also illuminates the fact that this trend has not changed much between 2017 and 2020. With the introduction of the 2022 OSTP Public Access (“Nelson”) Memo, there is hope that agricultural research published in the future may buck this trend.
The third full-length paper, “Staking out the Stakeholders: Using NIST’s Research Data Framework within a Public University System,” is written by Emily Kilcer, Bridget Almas, Jessica Koos, Andrea Media-Smith, and Catherine Stollar Peters. It provides a detailed overview of how the State University of New York (SUNY) worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to customize NIST’s Research Data Framework (RDaF) at their large, multi-site institution. The authors demonstrate how a collaborative RDaF Working Group at SUNY used the framework to assess and shape their RDM activities.
The two eScience in Action articles focus on pedagogy, with one highlighting an asynchronous statistical analysis microlearning course and the other highlighting a data science workshop series. Both learning activities were specifically designed to fill a specific need identified by librarians at their respective institutions, each using novel pedagogical approaches. In the first, Lena Bohman and Regina Vitiello of NorthWell Libraries write about the “Collaborative Development of a Statistics Microlearning Course for Health Professionals.” This article affords an inspiring overview of their project to implement an online, asynchronous microlearning statistics course for medical residents and fellows. In the article, the authors identify the need for a customizable refresher course on statistical analysis, as well as lessons on how to use the software GraphPad Prism. In order to provide their audience with bite-sized, easily digestible lessons that could conveniently be viewed on a mobile device, the team developed the microlearning course in SharePoint.
In the second eScience in Action article, Anna Sackmann, Lisa Ngo, Elliott Smith, and Misha Coleman of the University of California, Berkeley write about “Bridging data communities: Interoperability through inclusive, cross-institutional collaboration.” This article provides an overview of their successful data science workshop series at UC Berkeley. Developed in coordination with undergraduate students who serve as Data Science Discovery Consultants, librarians mentored those students on pedagogical approaches and best teaching practices to introduce a series of synchronous workshops for undergraduate students and local community colleges. They were even able to expand their course offerings to include a Spanish language workshop on introductory Python.
In the last, but certainly not the least, article, a commentary titled “Understanding how to identify and manage personal identifying information (PII) for further data interoperability,” Zixin Nie dives into the confusion around research data de-identification and how the removal of specific fields is not, in and of itself, sufficient to render research data de-identified. The impacts of non-US privacy and data laws, plus the use of non-HIPPA recognized fields, can still lead to a research participant being identified from so-called de-identified data. Nie introduces a classification framework and a risk measurement methodology to help researchers more thoroughly remove PII from their research data.
While the 2024 RDAP Summit was a great success, we are now only a few months away from the 2025 RDAP Summit. The 2025 theme is Evolutions in Data Services: Forging Resiliency, exploring the overlapping realms of data and information services from the perspective of resiliency.