Most
of the research data currently produced by graduate students in the course of
conducting the research associated with their thesis or dissertation is lost to
the university upon graduation. At best, it is stored on hard drives or servers
without metadata or other information to describe what the data consists of,
how it is structured, or how one might use it. It is therefore unavailable for
validation and reuse by other scientists via the internet. This year, the
Center for Digital Scholarship and Services (CDSS) at OSU Libraries interviewed
graduate students from a variety of disciplines in order to learn more about
their research data, to promote better data management practices among these
and future students, and to improve data management workshops that the library
offers.
Data
management refers to the active management of research data for preservation
and access. The Libraries and the Graduate School share a goal to improve data
management practices of graduate students and post-docs. Many students already
make their data more visible by depositing it alongside their thesis or
dissertation; in the ScholarsArchive@OSU open access repository; students are
required to deposit a PDF of their thesis or dissertation to the repository.
Long term, the Graduate School and Libraries would like to work with graduate
students to either deposit their research data alongside the thesis or
dissertation in ScholarsArchive@OSU, describe and link to the data from the
ScholarsArchive@OSU thesis/dissertation metadata record if the data is
available in a disciplinary repository, or provide a description of the data
and where it lives.
Among
the benefits: students and faculty would have a well-organized set of their
data and the ability to access it in the future. In many cases, the data
associated with the thesis or dissertation is part of a grant. PIs and Co-PIs
may be required to produce or otherwise have access to the data after the
student graduates. Student research data that is organized, able to be
understood by other scientists, and available with a unique and persistent
identifier can be reused and built upon, reducing duplication of effort and
enhancing scientific inquiry. Finally, student research data is an output of
the teaching, learning and research that is conducted at OSU. The data should
be valued as such, retained and made available to other researchers here and
around the world.
Data
management services at OSU, provided by faculty in the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services (CDSS), include
providing assistance with writing NSF, NEH and other data management plans;
providing individual consultation about metadata, data organization,
preservation and sharing; generating and maintaining digital object identifiers
for OSU-affiliated data files as a member of EZID; providing training through
workshops; and depositing datasets in the ScholarsArchive@OSU open access
repository. For more information: http://cdss.library.oregonstate.edu/data-services.