 All right, well, good morning everybody. Thanks for joining us for the first panel of today. You know, I get we get to be your warm-up act, your wake-up act after breakfast, so thanks for joining us. So Allison Hitchens and I will start off, and then we'll be joined by our colleagues for NCSU for the second part of this two-part panel. So my name's Ian Milligan. I'm an associate vice president at the University of Waterloo. I'm presenting here with Allison Hitchens, who's an associate university librarian at the University of Waterloo as well. And what we want to do is talk to you today about coordinating data services in a decentralized environment, building a successful institutional RDM strategy. So part of the motivating rationale behind this presentation is to address, you know, why are Ian and Allison working together? Why are we bringing the Office of Research and the library together to work together on a project? Now, what we're trying to tackle collectively is the problem of research data management on our campus. This is probably not a term that requires any introduction to the audience here at CNI, but we're responding to a policy, the tri-agency policy on research data management, and the tri-agency is referred to RDM as the processes applied to the lifecycle of a research project to guide the collection, documentation, storage, sharing, and preservation of research data. Now, I'm sure everybody here follows every individual twist and turn of Canadian higher education policy, and if you don't, I recommend that you do, because this is a Canadian US organization, but particularly we're responding to this data management policy, and it's a long document, it's actually worth reading if you're curious what other countries are doing in this space, but the germane paragraph is right here, that the tri-agencies which in Canada are the funders of social sciences and humanities research, natural sciences and engineering research, and health research, collectively have come together and argued that research data collected through the use of public funds should be responsibly and securely managed, and B, and I always highlight this, where ethical, legal, and commercial obligations allow available for reuse by others. To this end, the agencies are supporting the fair guiding principles for research data management and stewardship. And right now in Canada, across a very small portfolio of grants, unfortunately only five granting opportunities in the upcoming cycles, researchers are finally being confronted with data management plans, and we wanna make sure when they see those data management plans, they know what to do with them. So accordingly by March 1st, every Canadian institution that's eligible for federal funding needs to have an institutional RDM strategy. So that's why we're working together. But we tell our researchers that even if Canada had not gone down the RDM hole, that even if it wasn't the big evil tri agencies telling you that you need to begin to think about sharing your research data, the litany of policies and procedures you've heard about yesterday and approaches suggests that you can't hide from the long arm of RDM requirements, that the National Institutes of Health, as we heard about yesterday, are rolling out new requirements, the journal Nature, PLOS, the Welcome Trust, the EU Horizon Grants, Australia, et cetera, are all increasingly compelling researchers to think about their research data. Now, part of my portfolio is regulatory compliance, which is probably why I do this. And the last thing we want our researchers to do is to think of RDM as a compliance measure. The last thing that we need is some jerk AVP coming to them and saying, hey, you have to do this, because if you don't, I'm gonna find you in breach. What we are trying to do is articulate it positively. We're trying to use carrots, not sticks, and we're trying to really articulate the vision on campus that this new requirement is coming. Don't be afraid, because if you do what this requirement is telling you to do, you can be a better researcher. And I think this is probably familiar to everybody in this room. We are trying to convince researchers that if you steward your data, if you describe your data, if you preserve your data, and if appropriate, you share your data, they actually do help foster research excellence. That if you think about your data architecture at the beginning, you will avoid headaches down the road. You'll avoid that IP dispute. You might mitigate national security concerns. You might handle some of the ethical problems around the sharing of data if you thought about the architecture at the start. That you can access your older data and you can understand it. You can share it with other people so they can build on your work. And if we're all doing it, it's not the free rider problem. You can build on their work and they can build on your work. And crucially, you're protected from data calamity. Now, underscoring all this, and Cliff mentioned this a little bit yesterday, we of course don't want researchers just putting data onto disk for no reason. That'll just sit around forever. We want people to think carefully and cautiously about what it is that they're choosing to preserve. Now, when it comes to tackling this problem on campus, scope is a bigger challenge because RdM doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's alongside a broader landscape and ecosystem of research support, including research IT support, research ethics, grant support. And at our institution, like I'm sure many in the room, we have a very decentralized organization. So we have a library IT, we have central IT, we have faculty ITs, and we need to bring it all together. And we have to do something more than just build a portal, but we also don't want to step on other people's toes as we think about how to help researchers meet these new requirements. And so it was this context that we brought a team together to write a strategy. So our team was sponsored by central IT, by the library, by the office of research, Allison and I from the latter two. It's co-chaired by Allison and I, myself from research, Allison from the library, and we have representation across all the stakeholders, from IT, from the library, from research, from our faculties. We have a faculty member, we have a research support officer, and a plug to our consultants, Athenaeum 21, we got support as well. And I put this here, we actually never met in person. We just always met on teams, but if we had met in person, we would have had fun. So how did we, given this context, how did we rise to build the strategy? Well, first of all, we needed to know our audience. So we said, we got to find out what people think on campus but RDM. So we surveyed all our faculty, which is about 1,400 faculty and a few thousand graduate students and staff who engage in actively research. We surveyed, we received responses. Surprisingly, for the ones in my entire lifetime, more faculty than graduate students responded to the survey. And we learned a few things. We learned no one size fits all across campus. Researchers are overwhelmed. They don't want to deal with RDM until it's too late. There's too many conflicting and confusing policies. They want training and guidance, but they don't want it to be required. Communication is key. Skilled staff in HQP are needed to support new and existing requirements. And of course, analog data, paper especially, chemistry, notebooks, et cetera, are also important and need to be supported. And so we got this needs assessment. We had our working group and then we knew we had to consult even more. But we had a timeline so we wouldn't get bogged down in endless consultation, but in addition to our working group, we also built an advisory group of researchers, faculty and staff from across campus, plus a postdoc and a grad student, and we built ad hoc focus groups. Let's talk to the data managers. Let's talk to the indigenous researchers. Let's talk to IT staff about the challenges that they face in their area and the opportunities that they see. So after all this consultation, what are we going to do to coordinate our services on our campus? Well, in part some of our principles, so we've developed our draft strategy. If anybody wants to see a draft of it, come talk to me and I can hook you up. It makes a good bedtime reading. But if some of our principles reflect this landscape, that we realize that any RDM strategy needs to be about collaboration. It's a whole institution effort. We can't know one unit can do it alone. And that will leverage expertise that's around the university and around our international and national consortiums and partners. And then crucially, ease. I'm an ease guy. We want to make it easy for researchers to adopt RDM practices. We want to make it so easy that they become compliant with RDM policies and they don't even realize it. We've tricked them into being compliant and they don't need to ever get a mean email from anybody from compliance. And I'll turn it over to Allison to talk about the different options that we've had to bring this together. Great, thanks Ian. So in addition to having some principles laid out in our strategy, our very first strategic directive is around coordination. And I've included an image here that Athenaema21 had put in our needs assessment report that really kind of points out those key stakeholders that Ian's mentioned over and over again, but also all those different people across campus, whether it's IT and data managers in the faculties and departments, whether it's other offices on campus, whether it's things like the survey research center that provides services to our faculty. There's also a unit on campus that helps folks with data science. We have also our unit that helps people get access to statistics candidate data. There's a lot of things going on across campus. And sure we talk to each other from time to time, but there's no real coordination effort. So the first part of our strategy is figuring out how do we actually coordinate these services? And so when Ian and I have been thinking about it, we just put them into three categories. I'm sure each of these categories have many flavors of a center or a hub, a network or a community and a bit of a muddle. And so as Ian says, we all love portals. We can have a portal up that points people to our services, but that alone doesn't make a strategy. So we think about a center or a hub. It's got a lot of appeal because we're talking about something that's a more of a formal service partnership. So not just us talking together about these issues as we do right now, or when the Office of Research is doing a grant presentation that might say to the library, hey, do you wanna join our workshop and present on RDM? That's kind of what happens right now, but a more formal partnership with some dedicated staff that can actually lead the charge. They're not doing it off the side of their desk. They're being paid to make this effort happen. And being able to define some core central services that all of our researchers have access to, regardless of which discipline or faculty that they're in. We don't have an example of this for anything that we could think of on the Waterloo campus and in any subject area, whether that be wellness, research computing, data, teaching and learning. So we had to look elsewhere. So I know that we gave the example here of University of Toronto has their Center for Research and Innovation Support. I know McGill has their digital research services. Athenaeum21 mentioned to us University of Boulder at Colorado and some services at NYU. And I'm sure you'll hear some more services actually from our colleagues coming up next that they're building towards. So this is something that would be new to Waterloo and there'd be a lot of things that we'd have to do to work towards it and make it work in our very decentralized environment. What we're more familiar with at Waterloo is the network or community. And so Ian and I have kind of defined this as like a committee, a working group, a task force, whatever they decide to name it. That kind of helps coordinate activities across campus, but any funds are really kind of ad hoc or project-based funding. It's a very distributive model and you think about it, it's kind of voluntary. So we have our working group on bibliometrics. It has a list of stakeholders that are members, but we don't have to have a quorum at a meeting. You know Ian's not tapping on people's shoulders if they don't show up to talk about bibliometrics. It's a little bit more loosely coordinated and voluntary. We also have associated communities of practice sometimes which does help with the skill building. So it can be really useful. So our bibliometrics practitioners, for example, meet outside of our working group meetings just to talk about issues with each other. You know, things on how to use the software, what things they're trying to solve. And we have other examples on campus like the wellness collaboratory, where all the people that deal with student wellness on campus come together to talk. We've got things like our Keep Learning Team which started up during the beginning of the pandemic, but it's still meeting, which are things like the library, our Center for Teaching Excellence, our Center for External Learning. So we're very familiar with this network and community. But for someone like a chair like Ian, I don't think he's probably even sending, you know, I don't know what I'm gonna guess a percentage of your time with Ian that you spend thinking about bibliometrics. So it's a very different story than what if you had a more formal center. And we wanted to recognize the model because it doesn't have to be a bad thing. There's a lot of issues on our campus where it's probably okay that we're all working separately and then just as issues come up, we reach out to partners, we talk to them, we solve it together. That happens all the time for many different things. But probably as our data management plans and later data deposit becomes more and more common for researchers to have to be looking out for services, that's probably not a place that it's going to work for us. So we need to learn to collaborate in different ways. There's lots of good collaborations and partnerships on campus, but it's not collaboration to the point that there's so much of coordination of moving together all in the same direction and building services together. So we've been paying attention to the work that OCLC research has been doing on the social interoperability of research enterprise. That's really looking at that human connection. How do you actually get folks working together across different departments and units? And that involves individuals working together as well as looking at the priorities and strategies that units have. And recognizing that universities are really complex spaces with lots of different dynamics, lots of different priorities, funding models, and that you're trying to work together. And so Rebecca, let me borrow this slide from a recent presentation we did at the Charleston conference that really points out strategies and tactics that we're pretty used to if you even think about things like project management, the thinking of them in on a much grander scale around securing buy-in, making sure we're talking to people. And I think for me, the key one on this slide is being sensitive to timing. That not every group that you talk to is ready to talk to you right now. They might be something that three years from now they want to come back to the table and that's okay. This is not something that we're going to solve overnight. So start working with the people who want to work, build that credibility and trust over time with other people, finding those connectors, why are people interested in talking to you, especially if it's someone you don't work with all the time and making sure you have people in place to actually work on these relationships that are giving this some careful thought and energy and moving this forward. So as we're thinking about this, it felt like we've been working for about a year or so on our strategy and that all sounds great on paper. There was no one jumping up when we did our town hall saying, you can't coordinate, that sounds horrible. Why would you want to do that? There's no pushback on that whole concept of coordination and collaboration. But now we actually have to implement it. We need a roadmap, we need to move things forward. And so we're going to have to really have a good strong value proposition to talk to people about it, but why this is an all hands on deck thing? Why this isn't just a library problem or just an office of research problem or just an IT problem? And so we need to get buy in on the strategy implementation, which I think is a lot more work is going to be than getting buy in on the strategy itself. And so Billing shared understanding, having a new round of conversations to say, hey, when you listen to the strategy presentation, what did you take away from that? How did you interpret that? What did coordination mean to you when we were talking about it? Because I know from hearing things, some people walked away from our town hall presentation saying, oh, they're going to hire a whole bunch of IT staff to work on RDM, which was not necessarily the message that we were giving out. So we need to have those conversations. What did you hear when we said these words? So our next steps for us here at Waterloo is finalizing the strategy so that we can post it. That's the compliance issue, but with the recognition that anything that we do post is going to change over time. We need to work on that actual roadmap for the strategy goals, and talk about things like resourcing, which is always a fun topic on campus. How are we actually going to find the resources to move these things forward? What kind of coordination model, the ones we presented, is going to work for us? And probably recognizing that this is going to be a phased approach, starting with the partners who want to work with us. And I think really importantly, expanding that circle of conversations. We've talked to a lot of people in the last year, and I think we need to go back to those people, absolutely, but also think about who haven't we talked with? There might be people we've talked to, perhaps just presented to them, not very many questions, went away, thought that went great, but how do we actually have conversations with them now? What are the service providers that we've mentioned that we actually haven't sat down and had a conversation with? We just kind of have them mentioned in our thinking. So expanding that circle of conversations due to that coordination. So what we're hoping for in the next 10 minutes, before the next presentation, is to have some discussion with you. Of course, we're happy to take questions as well, but also some questions for you to think about, what have you been doing on your campus? And it could be research data management related, but it could be related to teaching and learning or wellness or any other thing on your campus where you've had to get units to collaborate together. What's worked for you? What are the challenges you've encountered? What are your sticking points? Is there a particular model that either appeals to you or found has actually worked? And how have you involved your researchers have been planning those activities? We've used them as advisory board. Have you gotten them involved in the actual planning of the services as you roll out? So those are suggested questions. They're not the only questions, but please feel free to come up to the microphones and join us in our conversation. Thank you. So I have a different question than on your list. We've just been asked to put together a cost model of what doing this work is costing us. And we haven't even really defined what it is we're doing yet. So I'm wondering if you've kind of worked with costing models or how you've been thinking about that. I believe that is on the to-do list coming up in January. I don't know, Ian, if you want to comment on that as well. Yeah, I just add that the critical thing is scoping services, right? We would have some faculty, when it comes to data management plan, that would truly believe, well, some of them truly believe that the library should write the data management plans, which is not a good idea, because it's going to go to merit review by disciplinary reviewers. But I think that's it, right? I mean, is it a level of service where you can sit down, have a one-on-one consultation with your data management plan and they're going to work together and you're going to have this great final product that you're going to sail right through peer review with. So I mean, if you want to scope that level of service, that's a higher level of FTE count than, if you're doing the help desk model of you know where you're going to contact. And an even lower one would be if we did more of the network model of we're going to get people together, we're going to build a community of practice, we're going to leverage existing resources and find ways to help. We've got data managers all over campus. I think we could gain some by adding no FTEs and just having people talking to each other and knowing when they get a query. I don't know that, but I actually know that there's someone in engineering who can handle that. And so I think it really is setting reasonable expectations around what service you'll scope and then the requirements come out of that. So good luck. So I really appreciate the comment that you made about that the timing is important, that you may start by planting a seed and coming back to it. But have you had the experience, and this is what I'm experiencing at my campus, is that there's been these territories drawn, you know like the Office of Research has their territory, IT has their territory and then the library is always trying to build those bridges. And so if you've met any kind of like territory, what advice would you have for overcoming that? Because I really feel like it needs to be those three main groups and then the other supports coming together. I mean, we're not gonna solve this problem in isolation. So what advice would you give me? I think part of that is that being able, I think as libraries to talk about what we're bringing to the table and how it's maybe a value add or an enhancement. So try not to, and I know that people can get put lines around their things, but trying to think about it is like, we recognize here's the great service that you provide, which is fantastic. And can we add some component on top of that or you might need to change the language a little bit. I could see around that. And sometimes it really is building that up over time. So I think that one of the things from my perspective at University of Waterloo that's really helped us in the library has been that working group on bibliometrics which has been around since 2013. So we might not have had as many conversations maybe in the past with the Office of Research, but because the library has been part of that working group since 2013 and they're kind of used to talking to us now all the time about bibliometrics and research impact, when we started to get here kind of the echoes about policy on research data management coming out from the tri-agencies, we started being kind of like this little broken record reaching out saying, oh hi, you wanna talk about this? So maybe we should bring in IT as well and having those conversations. So this wasn't an overnight thing. I think it's been happening for a number of years where we just keep reaching out, keep reaching out. Can we just have a conversation? Can we sit down and talk to it? And then by the time then we were starting to work on the strategy, we've had a lot of groundwork of those conversations. So I don't wanna suggest it's an easy answer. I think it's that kind of building trust or a time through conversations. And as I think as Rebecca Bryant would say from the OCLC research, sometimes the timing really is, they've noticed in some institutions, waiting for the people to change and that can be honestly be a part of, and you have no control over that. But they have seen that in certain institutions where something just didn't happen with a certain partner until the people at the table changed and then they were able to go back and have that conversation again. So it just has a really honest answer. There are times when there's certain roadblocks that are hard to come along because different personalities and ideas and priorities come into play. The only thing I'd add is it's the, as Allison is saying, it's the real relationship between people. So if you looked at our org chart, you've got research, like research in the library only meet at the level of the office of the president really because we're under separate VPs. So it really is setting up, making sure that I talk to Beth or you well, at least four times a year, like quarterly, Allison and I talk every day, same with other units as Allison is saying. And I think it's just building those relationships and not letting the org chart get in the way of effectively collaborating. Hopefully folks are okay out in the hall there with that crash, just kidding, yes, here. Hi, go ahead, thanks. So just in noting that the Tri-Council will be looking at the strategies for potential gaps, whereby to inform future streams of funding, just wanted to ask if any, have any gaps surfaced in your conversations that you've had with the broader campus or is it basically everyone's just trying to wrap their heads around the strategy? Anyway, I'll just leave it at that. I think that there are probably some gaps if we went back to our needs analysis of figuring out, there's kind of some broad gaps that I think that are, we had a lot of communication awareness gaps. So that's a solvable problem over time. But I think there's, I will answer it in this way, that there's some things where we really have to wonder, is that a service, is it something that we at Waterloo have to take on, or is it something that we should be talking to, either Compute Ontario or the Digital Research Alliance of Canada about, so I think that's where, and I think we're gonna be really thinking carefully as we go to something, there was something that Ian sent me yesterday, you know, an open source tool, I think from Los Alamos about finding people's research around the web, and he's like, oh, maybe we should have this, opensource.uwaterloo.ca, I said, should we have that, or should we talk to Scholar's Portal, or should we be talking to the Alliance, it should be something at the level of our national repository, so I think that's something that we're also trying to think about is making sure that we're not solving it as an individual institution, and making sure that not only the tri-agencies are aware of any gaps that we see, but also that the Alliance and others are aware of it as well. Thank you. Yeah, I just add, for a lot of what we're hearing, I don't think the tri-agencies will really go into the weeds on it, I think they'll see us in compliance, but what's been useful for us to talk to researchers in getting the feedback, hey, I feel like I'm overwhelmed, these applications are getting too many granular questions, I'm getting away from fundamental science, so that's a useful thing to feedback to the tri-agencies, the tenor of the response, and then also for me, I found from the needs assessment that some of the feedback was stuff of like, you know, I wish you did this, and the response from IT would be, well, they should just open a ticket, and I was like, well, it's not like, don't tell them to open a ticket, like it's a symbolism of like, how we actually engage with our faculty, which is not gonna be tickets, it's gonna be relational, and making sure they know who to contact. So we've got two minutes left, so I'm gonna go over to this side, or to the past, oh, there, okay, I'll go down to Pascal on this side, thanks. Hi, thanks for a great presentation. I just wanted to share some of the things that we've talked about at University of Windsor. I'm hopeful that this effort will also lead to conversations about how we can improve the kind of ecosystem around this. You know, we need innovations in the Canadian CCIV, in allowing data to be moved between repositories, research information systems, interoperate with Orchid and other things, and you know, maybe if you could just comment on some of the externalities that you might hope to see coming out of this process. Yeah, thanks Pascal. We've definitely, I think Ian talked a little bit to this in the scoping of making sure that as we have these conversations, we're thinking about those broader pictures, both broader in terms of the national picture, but also in the things that are RDM related, but also help other things. So Orchid ID, for example, is something that's not part of our RDM strategy, but certainly gets into that, being able to talk to people on campus about things like persistence identifiers, whether it be their data themselves, their other work, and how those kind of might then fit into the national infrastructure. So I think those questions are important to us. We do have a research computing committee now on campus, and then we have some other, and then through the bibliometrists committee. So partly is how to get even those different committees talking to make sure that we're looking at those big picture issues that aren't just, that's all part of that research landscape and not necessarily just RDM specific. I'm conscious of time. I'll just add, if you're a Canadian researcher, tell the, or a work at a Canadian institution, tell the tri-gencies about Orchid over and over again. And my worry is actually, for those in Canada know, we did a common CV, this really awful federal platform that really alienated researchers from even some cases applying for funding, very granular boxes, it Google it, it's like a nightmare that needs to be seen to believe. But my worry is that we're in Canada, we're in a response to that, and we're kind of developing simpler policies. And my worry is we're going, the pendulum is swinging so far too simple. We'll just get people to write bio sketches in their applications, and we'll just make everything lightweight. And then suddenly we're moving away from the opportunity to Orchids, we're moving away from the ability to have like fulsome disclosure of a researcher's whole CV. So if you're in Canada, you know, talk to the tri-gencies and let them know what you really wanna see. Cause if they hear it from a million directions, they'll do the right thing. So thank you very much everybody.