The RDM News Blog occasionally spotlights advocates in our community working with data and supporting data management practices in various ways. This month we highlight two Harvard Medical School members Caroline Shamu, Associate Dean for Research Cores and Technology, and Caroline Wood, Associate Director of Research Data Compliance. Caroline Shamu and Caroline Wood have been working together to gather faculty responses regarding the new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy. Read more about their commitment to data management and helping HMS faculty meet the policy requirements.
Q: Are you a member of the LMA RDMWG? When and why did you join the working group?
A: Yes! We were some of the original members of the group.
Q: What is your research focus and what type(s) of research data do you work with?
A: Before we had our current administrative roles, we each worked closely with research data. Caroline Wood worked in the Department of Health Care Policy supporting researchers with the acquisition and compliance of clinical and healthcare administrative data. Caroline Shamu was director of the ICCB-Longwood Screening Facility and worked with high throughput screening and assay data and helped to develop several repositories for data sharing.
We are collaborating to create the HMS NIH DMSP Catalog, a catalog of data management and sharing plans (DMSPs) created by HMS researchers in response to new NIH policies. Our goal is to provide examples of robust data management plans that have been approved by program officers and that can be used as models for grant applications from HMS investigators. We are also gathering information about the metadata standards and data repositories that are relevant to the work carried out at HMS.
Q: How do you support and promote data management in your work?
A: We both encourage the investigators we work with to develop practical data management and sharing plans that align with their research workflows. At the moment, the HMS NIH DMSP Catalog includes mainly proposed (but not yet approved) plans and is only accessible by department administrators. In the future, the catalog will include more plans that have received funding agency approval.
Q: What are some of your favorite data management tools?
A: DMPTool! This is an online application created in a collaborative effort of eight research institutions that provides templates for data management and sharing plans and is available through Harvard Library to all HMS Quad researchers.
Q: How do you see data management evolving in the research environment?
A: To advance science efficiently and ensure reproducibility, investigators are encouraged to follow the FAIR data standards so their published data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible (The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship). Research data are stored in many different forms and locations in HMS research groups. In the future, there will be more software tools to that help to annotate and organize information about datasets so that sharing research data publicly, so they are findable and accessible, will get easier.
Contributed by Caroline Shamu, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Research Cores and Technology, Faculty Director of the ICCB-Longwood Screening Facility, Harvard Medical School & Assistant Professor (Department of Radiology, MGH & Department of Biological Chemistry & Molecular Pharmacology, HMS) and Caroline Wood, Associate Director, Research Data Compliance, Office of Research Administration, Harvard Medical School
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