Open Research Data: Challenges and Prospects

Open Research London is a community of students, researchers and librarians in London passionate about making the outputs of publicly funded research more open and reuseable.

Join us from 6pm on Monday 27 Nov 2017 at the Francis Crick Institute for an evening of engaging talks surrounding Open Research Data! We’re lucky enough to have 4 excellent speakers approaching issues around research data from very different angles:

Using technology to break cultural silos: towards open data/open science

Aadi Narayana Varma (Head of Product and Innovation - Profeza)

Profeza is a start-up building Open Source and Open workflow software solutions to enhance Discoverability, Reusability and Reproducibility of the scholarly outputs. It was co-founded by two ex- Life Science researchers from India(Aadi Narayana Varma Dantuluri and Sheevendra Sharma). The Software suite aims to keep the process of enhancing reproducibility and reusability of data and published articles continuous in contrast to one-time event & simultaneously rewarding the researchers. They do this by providing better insights, Automating the process of Educating/training needed and provide an Infrastructure that aims to contribute towards the improvement of the quality of published article/data without affecting varied priorities of different stakeholders in the scholarly community. Their software tools are Open source, Inter-operable and comes without Vendor lock-ins. They are currently looking for pilot partners to potentially evaluate the usability of the solutions they have built with different stakeholders in the scholarly community.

Barriers to reproducible research (and how to overcome them)

Kirstie Whitaker (Research Fellow - Turing Institute)

This talk will discuss the perceived and actual barriers experienced by researchers attempting to do reproducible research in neuroscience, and give practical guidance on how they can be overcome. It will include suggestions on how to make your code and data available and usable for others (including a strong suggestion to document both clearly so you don't have to reply to lots of email questions from future users). It will include a brief guide to version control, collaboration and dissemination using GitHub as well as a discussion of tools to help you work reproducibly from the start. Exercises and resources will be persistently available after the talk and all audience members will leave knowing there is something they can do to step towards making their research reproducible.

Bio: Kirstie Whitaker is a Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (London, UK). She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2017. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and is a passionate advocate for reproducible neuroscience. She is a Fulbright scholarship alumna and 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine.

Open Data in Electron Microscopy: plans for an image archive

Ardan Patwardhan (Team Leader - EMBL-EBI)

The Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) is a global openly-accessible archive of biomolecular and cellular 3D reconstructions derived from electron microscopy (EM) data. The Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive (EMPIAR) stores raw image data relating to EMDB structures and is now expanding to include scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and soft X-ray tomography data. EMBL-EBI is considering establishing a global multi-modal bioimaging archive to enable the resume of data from this rapidly growing field. I will present an overview of the status of the archives and plans for future developments.

The State of Open Data

Mark Hahnel (Founder - Figshare)

Bio: Mark Hahnel is the founder of figshare, an open data tool that allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable, and sharable manner. Mark is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community.

Open data has become more embedded in the research community – 82% of respondents to a recent survey are aware of open data sets and more researchers are curating their data for sharing. The global commonalities in incentivisation and awareness of open academic research data go to show the increasing momentum around open research becoming the standard. A recent report from Figshare shows a tangible shift in researchers’ attitudes and data sharing practices in just a single year, and gives a sense that momentum is building. The report also highlights the need for funders and institutions to keep educating their academics about data.