In sharing we trust. Taking advantage of a diverse consortium to build a transparent data service in Catalonia
Creators: name: Llebot, Clara
name: Alcalá Ponce de León, Mireia
name: Anglada i de Ferrer, Lluís M.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: data management
consortium
data management services
data management plan guidance
data repository
eiNaDMP
Repositori de Dades de Recerca

description: This talk was presented at the International Data Curation Conference in February 20th, 2024. 

The Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya (CSUC) is a consortium that serves 13 universities and 33 research centers in Catalonia and neighboring communities. In 2017 the CSUC created an Open Science department to collaborate with universities and research centers on facilitating the adoption of Open Science requirements. Even though CSUC also offers services to researchers directly (for example, its supercomputing resources), this talk will focus on CSUC’s work with its member institutions to create and offer data management services. We will explain how CSUC has led the creation of a robust shared governance system, and how it takes advantage of the diversity of its members to create useful, high quality, and transparent services for all researchers in the Catalan research system. Through sharing each other’s experiences, values and priorities, the result is better than separate ad-hoc solutions. The process also creates a community of practitioners that develop expertise together with the help of professional development opportunities organized by CSUC, like recurrent self-learning labs focused on data curation tools, techniques, and processes.

The talk will be structured around two examples:

1.       The collaborative approach that CSUC organized to create guidance and examples for Data Management Plans in CORA.eiNa DMP, CSUC’s instance of DMPonline. All member universities participated in at least one committee, contributing their different expertise to the task. This process left the participants with a solid understanding of the resulting templates, and a sense of ownership.

2.       The process of writing the policies of the CORA.RDR data repository. CSUC manages this data repository, an instance of Dataverse, and it was important for the members of the consortium to have a role in the governance of the repository. CSUC led the writing process using questions and comments from the members as a starting point. This is a live document that is continually being updated when new challenges arise. For example, what should the size limit for datasets be? All institutions must observe the same limits. To answer this type of question a committee creates a draft considering the needs of all the institutions. All committees have at least one representative from a university (typically with a library background) and one representative from a research center (typically with a more technical, research background). The draft is discussed in a meeting, and all institutions vote on it.  

This talk will be delivered by the data management specialist of Oregon State University, an R1 university from the United States, who has been working at CSUC while on sabbatical for the last 5 months. It will include a short reflection on the strengths of this collaborative model compared with her experience creating and maintaining data services without the benefit of input from other institutions.