 Because as I mentioned a few people before as Richard knows very well, we're actually in the middle of our ENDS project, we're not actually completed our project. Can everyone hear me okay? Yep, excellent. So at first I thought I've actually come into the ENDS project in the middle. I actually started probably at VU 12 months ago and it had been proposed by the former research director at Victoria University. And the project was underway slightly before he'd left and actually it was taken on board by a project manager, Terry Dentry at Victoria University for a while. And then I came on board a number of months into it. Now I believe some of the aspirations of the project at Victoria University were around open access, trying to promote more the open access access to data as well as results in the university. And that was something that the research office, which is where the project was run out of, was actually very keen to see happen as well as the library that was involved in the project. There were also aspirations around establishing a kind of a data assets registry or repository at the university at the start of things. And there was a kind of a vision that we would actually have a kind of seamless metadata continue across this kind of repository that people would actually be registering data sets and would be collecting the metadata that we needed to help and facilitate in the management of the data and towards some sort of continuing towards ENDS at the end when you actually say, well actually we're willing to promote this data set now and make it open access. So I think those are some of the visions in the early project. So I'll talk a little bit about how it kind of unfolded and then after that talk about some of the things that happened as it unfolded. And then at the end I'll talk about some of the lessons learned in retrospect I guess, even though we haven't actually completed yet things that we would have done differently or should have considered earlier I guess is a way I should actually say. So in the early days I believe before I come on board we had done a bit of an analysis to actually say what sort of systems are available out there, what are other universities looking at. We didn't want to completely go it alone. We thought it would be good to follow the pack and actually come up with a solution that could be supported to some extent. And we'd identified that the VTRO system or Vivo Web which is the route that Melbourne University and I believe Subsequent and Griffith University had gone was actually the solution that we chose to do. We knew that Versi, the Victorian Research Strategic Initiative had some expertise in that because they had been helping Melbourne on that particular project as well. So that actually helped us set up some of the technical side of that and we're actually hosting an instance of VTRO for us in the early days. And that was really good. We also looked out there at what other people were doing in terms of collecting the metadata that was required, the information for ends, and identified that Monash was way ahead of the pack in terms of collecting that information. So we had adopted the Monash Research Data Management form in that case. And in addition to that we'd adopted I think a model that had come from Monash where we had been presenting to the researchers to say, here are three different sorts of ways that you can make your data available. There's an open access model where you say we just provided open access with some licensing around it potentially. There's a restricted access model where we might actually have some restrictions around it only available for research or only available in certain conditions. And there would be a negotiated access model where there would have to be some sort of form of contact and then some sort of discussion about how that data was going to be used and the conditions around how it would be used. Now we had in the early days identified through the research office, great working in the research office. You've got access to a lot of information. About 20 researchers out there or 20 research groups which we thought could be very good to help us start collecting those datasets that we needed to get up there in the research data commons. And the target number of datasets that we had were 50 at Victoria University. And the project team was a fairly small team at first. It was mostly just a project manager that sat within the research office. Kind of a data analyst who was a slightly more technical person sitting within the research office. And we also had liaison with the library a little bit in the early days on the project. Now kind of halfway through the project when I had come on board, we were in a position that we had started to look at the university policy as well around research data management. So there was quite a bit of work done on developing the policy for research data management in parallel to this project. But trying to keep the ENDS project in mind as well as good data management practice and the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, obviously. So what had happened, when we found that we were going to talk to researchers, quite a lot of them were quite reluctant. I think we had hit them with the word open access first, which was probably a little bit scary for many of them. And we'd actually found that many of them had said that the ethics around their project said no, no way we could do that. In fact, they were required to destroy the data after X number of years, which was not really what the Australian Code of Responsible Conduct for Research had said, but that was the impression that they'd gotten either from the ethics forms that we had in the place or through just some kind of social understanding of what you needed to do for a research project. So fairly early on, we actually thought that we actually should go and talk to the ethics committees about this just to try and understand what's happening there. Let's just get some kind of buy-in, if we can, from the ethics committee around the ENDS principles around putting things in the research data comment and actually try and understand where this is coming from that you have to destroy. Is that actually coming from the ethics committees? And in doing so, we were quite surprised. We talked to them about the ENDS project and we talked to them about, in some sense, the open access movement and where ENDS had come from. And we actually got a very positive result, and many of the committee members had actually said, look, we actually think it's unethical not to share data that's come under ethics projects if you do it in the right way. The reality is it's less ethical to have to repeat the studies on human or animal subjects than it is to actually share the results, which is a fabulous result. We actually thought, well, excellent. They're actually saying that the ENDS process or the ENDS principles of sharing data is a good one. And they had not understood at all that the researchers were thinking they must destroy things after a seven-year, after a five-year period. So I think since then we've actually managed to change the ENDS form. Sorry, not the ENDS form, the ethics form that we have at the university to state that you need to retain the data for a five-year period, but you need to think carefully about evaluation of that data at that five-year period, not immediately jump to the conclusion that everything needs to be destroyed. We also have questions in there about are they going to be sharing their data with other researchers and what are the processes that they're going to do around that? Now, I don't say that we've got that perfect at the moment. It actually takes quite a long time to talk to ethics committees because it's one of these back-and-forth things where they only meet every three months at VU, the main ethics committee, and we have to actually propose something to them. They come back with a number of questions and concerns. We go back and forth and we're kind of still in that process actually to some extent. But I think that has actually given a lot of the researchers here some confidence that we are actually talking to the ethics committee. The ENDS process is not separate from that. So we're very mindful of inappropriate use of data, I guess, or inappropriate sharing of data and that the ethics committee is aware of what we're trying to do in principle agrees with what we're trying to do. So we found that really quite useful. Now, in engaging with the 20 researchers, we end up with a conversion rate of... Most of them are positive, I have to say. Almost all of them were really supported in the project. But in the end, the 20 researchers that we interviewed converted into five datasets. And it took quite a lot of effort to actually organize and go through these interviews with the researchers. And sometimes there was more than one interview that we had to go through to get some of what we wanted. So scaling up the five is 20 to 50, is 200. We quickly realized that actually we're not going to have enough resources to actually go out there and do 200 interviews. And in fact, we quickly went out of research, as if we did that because VU being a small institution. So we had to think differently about how that occurred. Now, I'll talk about that in the lessons learned at the end about where we are at the moment about trying to get over the line, trying to get over that 50 with the records. So in addition to that, we also realized at the same time that the vitro system that we had chosen required a level of technical capability and capacity and a level of cost involved in that, that we couldn't actually sustain here at VU beyond the period of the project. So I think that's something that's really quite important to think about from the start. So we actually had come up with a slightly more simple solution, which was a form, basically, on a very simple one, WordPress, pretty much. And we actually had this, for a short period of time, a bit of an idea where we actually use that and then transfer it into vitro and then transfer it into ANS. Since that time, we actually done another analysis and we out there and looked at what other universities were using. What is it that we could support and sustain in the long term and other universities supporting and sustaining it. And then come to the conclusion that, look, vitro probably was the best choice at the time. However, if we, in retrospect, keep all those things in mind, we couldn't identify a choice at the moment that was over and above the very simple system that we currently had, pretty much. So I'll show people an image of what that looks like later if you're interested. Now, well, I've got written down here, I've written down some notes. So now, in using the form, we developed this form using an online system and we based it on the form, the research data management form that we'd obtained from Linash. And we'd found that we ended up having a lot of difficulty, well, in the first instance, getting the researchers to put the information in was kind of okay for that, the five that we ended up getting. But then we actually had to try and get that into a format that actually kind of looked okay once it came through ANS and then out onto RIFCS and out onto Research Data Australia's website. And we ended up doing quite a lot in the early days of massaging of the information that we got from the researchers to get it into the right format and present it in a way that kind of came out looking okay on ANS. And then we actually had to work through the quality process with ANS as well to ensure that the information that we're bringing was kind of met their quality control. So this took quite a long time and I think one of the things that we've learnt from that process is that sometimes taking somebody else's form is not necessarily the best way to go. I think that we would have been better off actually having worked backwards from ANS and RIFCS to some extent how we wanted it to look than rather than starting out with something that we thought was slightly better in terms of research data management. So okay, yeah. So that's basically about it. Now in terms of lessons learnt, I think, one of the things I think we've learnt from this is that we should have been looking at the endpoint first. We should have been trying to understand, what do we hope to get out of the ANS project? And I think that we've come to an understanding that what we really want to get out of this is not just the outputs of the project but we would actually like a sustainable service to come out of this to attempt to help our researchers do whatever it is that it does. So one of the things we have to identify is what is the value of that service? Is it about having a repository? Do the researchers care about that? Is it about open access because that didn't seem to fly really? But what we kind of got to the point of when talking to researchers, and I think you can see there on the screen at the moment if you go to our eResearch support site, one of the actual things that we actually had a bit of traction for that particular service was about the promotion data. So a value of sticking your information into the research data Australia is that you are promoting your work. You're promoting yourself and you're promoting the existence of that data set. That can lead to interdisciplinary collaborators coming to you and saying, hey, I'd really like to work with you on that data set. And that doesn't mean that they steal it, that it's open access. They're just using your work and running with it. That means that they may have to contact you and collaborate with you. So further opportunities for more projects, more funding, more papers, more outputs and greater connections within the research community within Australia. So that is the shape of the service that we would like to provide here at Victoria University. It's an optional service. It's not something that we're actually seeing researchers need to actually subscribe to this, but we will promote it as being something valuable for an avenue for facilitating collaboration. In terms of getting over the line on the number of data sets that we need to put into research data Australia to complete the project, we had to start to think outside of the box. We weren't going to get it through the interview process with the resources and the time that we had. So in thinking about it, we should have actually engaged with the library a lot earlier on in the project, I think. But for a few reasons we hadn't, it was run out of the research office. But in engaging at the library, I think there's been a very valuable thing for us to do. We are now looking at the special collections that we actually have in the library. It's been a great range of things that are multi-purpose, cross-disciplined, high value. And some of the things that we actually have here at Victoria University are quite unique. So those will be the next round of things that we put up in Research Data Australian. There's quite a lot of those. In talking with some of the local researchers here, we have a university archive, which is quite separate from the library. But our researchers have discovered a number of valuable research collections inside the archive. So that will be one of my future jobs to actually go into the archive and see what we can identify as research collections. And as I said before, engaging with the library is very valuable because they're out there. They're also helping some people and faculty set up collections, which is great. And something we trialled, but we haven't seen come to fruition yet, is that we have a number of internal grant schemes. And working in the research office, we have some control over that. So we've factored in to the rules for the current round of internal grant schemes that the outcomes in terms of research data sets have to be registered in Research Data Australia, the rules. We haven't actually seen the outcomes of that yet, but I think we will eventually, and that will probably be something that we continue to do. So that's an area that we have had some control over. An area which we don't have control over and never will, I think, being a university that does an awful lot of industry engagement, a lot of our funding is commercial funding or sector funding that isn't public funding. And because of that, the ability for us to open access all of our data sets is just not feasible. But our internal grant schemes are publicly funded, so therefore we can actually set the rules there. I'll just kill that. Okay, what else do I want to talk about? Now, in addition, we had thought in our aspirations, if you recall, attempting to have this kind of repository of data at the university and having this continuum of metadata that goes from current management or planning all the way through to the ENDS project. And while I think that's still a good aspiration, one of the things that we've learned, as I mentioned, working backwards from ENDS, the RIF-CS, is that that's actually extraordinarily difficult. And you need metadata that's fit for purpose. I mean, the metadata that's fit for purpose in RIF-CS is about presenting yourself, or possibly even promoting yourself in research data in Australia and representing the data set and the project around it. And that's information fit for public human consumption. A lot of the information that we've found through developing the research data management policy in order to do integral research data management on campus to make sure that the data sets that we have, we know that they're under ethics. We know whether or not there are contracts or restrictions around them. We know about how long they need to be kept for who's in control and what are the processes we need to put in place and are there special software you need to know. A lot of that information, we want to try and make a minimal impact on the researcher when recording that. And that means that the information is not fit for public consumption when it gets all set and done. We want actual notes pretty much in there. We don't want a paragraph. So those two ends of the spectrum of the metadata continuum, I guess, have diverged and not converged. So the research data registry which we're looking at implementing will be a longer process at VU because it will actually be more of an enterprise asset, I guess, than the end service. And the sorts of metadata that we're looking at putting in there are not the sorts of metadata that we're looking at putting into ends at the moment. So that's just what we've found anyway, that trying to roll those two requirements together may have been more of a burden and may have actually extended the ends project out even further. Finally, I think, again, underestimate the amount of effort that it takes to actually get some of the datasets that you need into the end system. Having a perfect IT system doesn't help. You've got to get out there and talk to people. You have to form alliances with other like-minded parts of the university. If you're running it through a library, form an alliance with the research office, if you're doing it through the research office, which I think might be a little bit unusual, I'm not sure, form an alliance with the library, talk to IT early on about what it is that you can support and sustain in the long-term. And don't underestimate the value of support you can get from e-research groups around the place. You'll state the e-research body because we've had quite a bit of help on the technical side of things with FERSI, the Victorian New Research Strategic Initiative. And those are some of the sorts of things that we couldn't have done in-house, or if we had of it, it would have taken us quite a lot longer. And so I think that's probably about all I have to say. Do we want to turn other people's microphones back on while their question's coming through or something? We have a few people here. Actually, someone's mentioned also research ambassadors. We have at Victoria University, we're actually investigating in terms of e-research service promotion in general, how do we get the messages out there? Because global emails are just frustrating for everybody. And one of the mechanisms we're investigating is effectively around kind of almost social connections and we have a group of people that we hire who are later year top PhD students and they actually do a lot of support in our hire through the library and they're called research ambassadors and they support both researchers and research students at Victoria University. So making them aware about Research State Australia has been a strategy that we have here, so they're able to actually talk to researchers about it. If somebody comes to them with a data set, they can say, hey, have you thought about promoting your data set in Research State Australia? And here are some of the other VU data sets in Research State Australia. Here's what it looks like. Here's some of the data sets. So that's one area we're investigating. I've got another question here. Will VU Research Data Registry have more or less metadata than Research Data Australia? I'm not sure if I understand that. Will VU Research Data Registry have more or less metadata than Research Data Australia? It's actually quite different. The metadata that we want, there are some overlaps. But in actually going through what it is that we thought we would need in terms of being able to manage and maintain the data in the long term, we found it to be quite different. Research Data Australia I think the purpose is a bit different. It's about discovery, understanding the value of what's in the metadata. But yeah, I'm happy to share with people what we've come up with in terms of a proforma for that. There are overlaps, but really what we want is that we want everybody to fill in what metadata we have in the Research Data Registry. And because of that, we really want quick answers. We don't want you to put into human readable terms what sorts of data sets in there. We want you to say, this data, that data, that data, that data, what's the location? Do I have a catalogue somewhere for these sorts of things? Do I need to retain these for integrity or don't I? Are these just interim data sets? How long do I need to retain a full? So it's probably more structured information, I guess, in that respect. Does that answer the question? So a question. Our researchers at VU using discipline-specific metadata scheme is in addition to RISCS. I'd be shocked if they would, frankly. We're not trying to integrate those things, I think. And we're actually not even trying... We're not really considering offering services to support that at the moment. I think we will be. The Research Data Registry that we will provide probably will not, in the first instance, also support discipline schemers. We would probably hope that they would need their own systems to support those discipline schemers. It'll just be the minimum that we need to support to have a registry that helps us with our research data management procedures at the university and faculty and school level. Can you expand on the role of the library in your project? Ah, okay. In the early days, the library, we just had kind of liaison with them, I think, for a while. And they weren't really sure what their role in the project was. Now we actually have an e-research librarian that does some of the research data. She comes over quite frequently and has actually worked on some of the technical aspects of the project. That's been really good. We also are using the library, not just in terms of the special collections, which are sitting within the library, so they're actually entering, they're providing some of the collections. But we're using them as almost team members to help us actually source extra data sets out there. So I think, you know, we've gone from a point where we should have been including them more to a point where they're actually far more engaged in the project. And actually helping in developing the back end to do the connection from our online form into the RIFCS at the machine to machine level. Can you tell us more about how you set up the system with internal grant scheme? Which departments were involved? The research office. Basically. So an advantage of actually running the project out of the research office is that we can actually make those decisions. You know, some approval from the PVCR sits immediately above us. So I think it was actually fairly easy. It may have been more difficult if you were running your and sitting in the Commons project not out of the research office. I missed a question from Evelyn Sue. Okay, I'll scroll back up. How successful was adding conditions to the internal grants? Yet to see the results of that. It was a mandatory requirement. If they produced data sets as a result. Of course, there's always the chance that they will just want to mention the fact that they've produced data sets. That can occur. And we haven't seen the fruits of that yet. Because they had just kind of started this year. Now I believe some of them may be close to getting to a finishing point. So we need to follow up on that. Are people interested in seeing the online form that we've actually come up with? It's actually fairly simple. So this is the online form. This is just a WordPress that we actually have. At the moment it's cloud hosted. We'll have to actually bring it back into the EU. And I'm logged in as an administrator. So I can see some of the administrative aspects of the form. It's fairly simple. We have information about people involved. The project details. Some basic information about the collection. How might people access that data set? Are there related publications involved? We end up getting kind of a default university copyright statement. Now I should also mention. That just reminds me that we had to talk with the legal team for a while. Because we tried to understand what are the possible implications of putting things up in the end's registry. And also of actually putting a copyright effectively on things that researchers may potentially not own. Eventually we got down to a very, very simple solution. Which was there is a field in this form called list external people or organizations who must be contacted before granting access or copies. That's what the legal team had said. And that for us is just a flag that doesn't go into ends. If anybody types anything in that box, that flags us within the research office to say, look we have to double check that the copyright on that is okay. It's correct. That the researchers have actually had permission to be able to put that up into ends. So we've got to do a bit more work. Basically a bit more ground work. But it was a very simple solution of just saying, look if these people have identified an external organization who's involved, the standards of the copyright may not apply because it may be a collaborative piece. And they may or may not have sought permission to be able to put that up into the ends registry. And we need to double check. But if there are no external people or organizations involved, then our default policy says that the VU owns the dataset. Therefore we can apply the VU ownership and copyright and in principle can allow it to go up. Is this form open to other institutions to see or only available to VU staff? At the moment it's only available to VU staff. But we can actually probably make it open at some point. If people are interested, I can actually send around a, probably I can save it as a HTML file or something perhaps I think. Or maybe I can print it to PDF. That might actually be better because it is a dynamic form. It may not say it properly. Yeah, and just being reminded by the end stuff there that we were written up in one of the ANN's guides around ethics where they're talking about what a number of universities are doing around ethics. So just a bit of a plug to go and have a look at the guide if you are interested in engaging with your ethics people early at your university. That's about it. Any other questions? I'll also mention that this form has evolved. So it did actually, as I mentioned, start out looking an awful lot more like the Monash form. But because so much messaging was required by hand to get that into RIF-CS, we thought we'd better off just to ask what it was that we actually need to get into RIF-CS if we're going to make this a sustainable service that doesn't require an awful lot of people's time to keep going. If we're going to just do some brief checking of the quality for the information on the top of it. I'm very happy to share this form anyway. But I think you'll hear that from almost all of us in Commons' projects. Many people will say, look, very happy to share with you any of them to provide it. We've produced any of the technical solutions we've produced. Lyle, I think there was a question from Rebecca Parker that I'm not sure you answered. Sorry, Beck, did I miss one? Have researchers filled this in yet? I'd be curious to know how they went with it. Yeah, a few of them have filled it in. And we've had feedback from every single one of them. So yeah, I think it's actually gone reasonably well. We got it to the point where we think that most of the questions are clear now. And there are a few buggy things. One of the things we found tricky was that our organisation, like everyone, is in a state of flux in terms of our faculties and schools. And maintaining that list of information was just going to be an absolute nightmare. But having worked with ANDS, I think we've come up with a solution. So that will change slightly the way that we do that. But other than that, I think we're at the stage where almost all of it's fairly straightforward. And we've put a lot of explanation and help text around it as well. Are there any questions? I should mention, sorry, one of the things, Beck, that has been an issue is where we've found some areas that have lots of collections, like the library, for example. And they would probably have a lot of information in that form that would be in common. They wanted a way that they didn't have to type it in all over again. And there was no real default way to do that within the system. It turns out in the back end of the system, if they create one of them, we can create replicas and then they can go in and fix the other versions. So that was just something we had to do. Sorry, somebody. Everybody's unmuted if anyone has a question that they'd like to ask, Blau. Thank you for listening. Hopefully none of that was useful.