Building Tools to Support Active Curation: Lessons Learned from SEAD

Abstract

SEAD – a project funded by the US National Science Foundation’s DataNet program – has spent the last five years designing, building, and deploying an integrated set of services to better connect scientists’ research workflows to data publication and preservation activities. Throughout the project, SEAD has promoted the concept and practice of “active curation,” which consists of capturing data and metadata early and refining it throughout the data life cycle. In promoting active curation, our team saw an opportunity to develop tools that would help scientists better manage data for their own use, improve team coordination around data, implement practices that would serve the data better over time, and seamlessly connect with data repositories to ease the burden of sharing and publishing.
 SEAD has worked with 30 projects, dozens of researchers, and hundreds of thousands of files, providing us with ample opportunities to learn about data and metadata, integrating with researchers’ workflows, and building tools and services for data. In this paper, we discuss the lessons we have learned and suggest how this might guide future data infrastructure development efforts.

FAIRising Pedagogical Documentation for the Research Lifecycle

“…As suggested in the 2019 and 2021 projects, “FAIRised” [ 2 , p. 8] pedagogical documentation is needed to facilitate efficient and reliable pedagogical research on how (inter)disciplinary topics are taught and students trained. An added benefit is the capability to link curricular resources to publications and data sets in academic libraries, archives, and data repositories [ 7 , 18 , 26 ]. The (re)use of research outputs, inclusive of curricular resources, allows for more complete comprehension of interdependencies within the research lifecycle [ 27 ].…”

“…Teams of faculty and students launch academic research projects and often consult with information professionals to deploy metadata and build skills [ 3 , 4 , 6 ]. Information professionals – librarians, archivists, and data curators who often have overlapping technical and soft skills – are well-positioned to participate in research initiatives and guide the process of metadata creation throughout projects [ 7 – 9 ].…”

“…By the 2010s, publishers based accountability for research integrity on reproducible data sets [ 14 , 15 ]. The unreliability of researcher data sets, however, posed obstacles to—even a crisis in—reproducibility [ 5 , 7 , 14 , 16 , 17 ]. Greater integration of journals and data repositories, along with the involvement of researchers in data management, now supports research integrity whether data is discrete or aggregated [ 6 , 16 , 18 , 19 ].…”

(Hyper)active Data Curation: A Video Case Study from Behavioral Science

“…Here we suggest new methods and technologies to relieve the burden of data curation, improve data management, and thus make data sharing a welcome and integral part of behavioral research. Instead of "posthoc" (after the study ends) data curation, the approach used by most behavioral scientists, we advocate for "active" (i.e., upload as you go) data curation, an approach endorsed by library scientists (Akmon, Hedstrom, Myers, Ovchinnikova, & Kouper, 2018;Myers & Hedstrom, 2014). Indeed, we take active curation a step farther.…”

“…Library scientists endorse active curation-where data are uploaded, tagged, and earmarked for sharing throughout the research lifecycle, rather than after the study is completed (Akmon et al, 2018;Myers & Hedstrom, 2014). We agree.…”