In late September 2023, the University of Waterloo hosted a two-day workshop, “Building an Inter-Institutional and Cross-Functional Research Data Management Community: From Strategy to Implementation.” The goal of the event was to facilitate multi-institutional collaboration in Canada. It did this by bringing together cross-functional cohorts from several Canadian institutions, where each cohort team was comprised of a research administrator, an IT professional, and a librarian—a configuration which also helped strengthen intra-institutional relationships, as well.
This event was made possible by financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC, one of the Canadian Tri-Agencies), and many other individuals and institutions contributed to the success of the event, including the University of Waterloo (host), University of Calgary, University of Ottawa, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), OCLC, Compute Ontario, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.
The Canadian RDM policy environment
This event was convened in order to help institutions respond to national mandates announced by the Canadian Tri-Agencies (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) are referred to collectively as the Tri-Agencies). In March 2021, the Canadian Tri-Agencies released a Research Data Management Policy that impacts research institutions, with these three primary components:
- Data management plans (DMPs) are to be required with any grant proposal to a Tri-Agency. Roll out has begun, but slowly.
- Any research institution receiving Tri-Agency funding (251 in all) was required to submit an RDM institutional strategy by March 2023. The strategies were intended to identify capacities and gaps, provide a snapshot of national RDM capacity, and support Tri-Agency planning.
- Deposit of research data in an appropriate repository WILL be required, but dates and specifics are not yet defined by the Tri-Agencies.
Institutions have been responding to these requirements by establishing cross-functional teams. For example, the University of Waterloo established an RDM Institutional Strategy Working Group, charged by the Vice President for Research and International, the University Librarian, and the Chief Information Officer. This working group developed an institutional strategy for the university that evaluates current RDM capacities, identifies changes necessary to comply with funder policies, and charts a path forward for facilitating responsible data management across the research life cycle.
The March 2023 deadline for creating and submitting institutional RDM strategies has passed. Now what?
Well, theoretically, each institution should now turn its attention to the implementation of its local RDM strategy. But with complex issues like sensitive data storage and Indigenous data sovereignty, consultation and even partnership with other institutions is desirable. So the Canadian RDM community convened to explore how they might work collectively to address local challenges.
The RDM community workshop
The organizers originally anticipated convening cohorts from ten institutions at the workshop. But when 30 institutions expressed interest in attending, the organizers (with generous additional support from the two University of Waterloo units, the Library and the Office of the Vice President, Research and International) expanded the event to support greater community engagement.
The event was held on 27-29 September 2023 on the University of Waterloo campus, and the event offered a balanced program of presentations and small group discussions. The presentations offered a grounding in the goals of the Tri-Agencies RDM policy, a history of RDM in Canada, as well as brief deep dives into some of the challenging issues of data management, including:
- Ethics, security, and sensitive data storage
- Indigenous data sovereignty
- Social interoperability and the challenges of collaboration
- Harmonizing data management practices for multi-institutional research teams
But most of the event was spent engaged in fruitful discussion with others, as participants discussed challenges, experiences, and priorities in a variety of small group configurations, such as by:
- Functional groups (i.e., with others from the functional areas of IT, research, or libraries)
- Institutional type
- Thematic challenges
- Recommendations and priorities for action
Volunteers documented the conversations in a shared note taking environment, providing a rich, community-developed record to inform next steps.
Where is the community now?
These conversations surfaced the opportunities, challenges, and anxieties that participants face, including:
- Cross-campus social interoperability is improving. Supporting RDM is an institutional effort, requiring multiple campus units to work together. Oftentimes, these campus units had little familiarity with each other, but many participants reported that over the past couple of years they’ve developed relationships with other stakeholder units. With continued effort, these collaborations are finally becoming easier. A feature of this workshop was bringing those people together—often traveling for hours together to get to the event—which no doubt further strengthened these relationships. Participants came from across the country–from Newfoundland to British Columbia to the Northwest Territories!
- Little capacity for growth. Many participants expressed concerns and anxiety about their capacity to meet growing needs, an anxiety that seemed universal across institution size, resources, and home unit of all participants. Many participants already felt that they were working at or beyond capacity, which is all the more concerning considering that the Tri-Agencies hasn’t even implemented its data sharing requirements yet.
- The library is expected to lead. It was clear from the discussions that non-library stakeholders (IT and the research office) hope that the library will assume many RDM responsibilities, particularly activities like helping researchers with data management plans (DMPs) as well as metadata curation. Librarians are worried. Clearly more staff resources are needed, but as one participant said, “If more money isn’t coming, what do we stop doing?”
- Collaboration is essential for addressing complex challenges. There was widespread agreement that finding solutions to major challenges, such as how to manage and store sensitive data, should not be tackled at the institutional level. Instead, institutions must pool their knowledge and experience.
- Institutions must address Indigenous data sovereignty. The Tri-Agencies policy recognizes that a “distinctions-based approach is needed to ensure that the unique rights, interests and circumstances of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit are acknowledged, affirmed, and implemented” and aligns with the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. I heard about some institutional efforts, like institutions implementing Indigenous Review Boards (in addition to existing IRBs) or facilitating a community like the Indigenous Research Network at the University of Toronto. But there is widespread concern about “community exhaustion,” and perceptions that the consultation process with Indigenous peoples can be extractive and burdensome. Multi-institutional collaboration may emerge as a positive way to consult and scale.
What’s next?
Convening the event was just the beginning. The workshop team has now busily moved onto the next steps of this effort, including the establishment of a RDM community Slack channel, preliminary coding of the copious event notes, and convening a follow-up virtual meeting. And note, this effort builds upon previous strong Canadian collaboration around RDM.
A next big challenge is to effectively synthesize the knowledge shared in the workshop into a position paper with prioritized short- and long-term recommendations for the Canadian RDM community. This is an exciting collaborative effort–and all the more interesting because it unites libraries with other RDM stakeholders. A new OCLC Research report entitled Building Research Data Management Capacity: Case Studies in Strategic Library Collaboration is also highly relevant to this effort. It provides a case study examination of the Canadian Portage Network effort led by CARL, and concludes with actionable recommendations that libraries can apply to make their own collaborations successful and sustainable.
Rebecca Bryant, PhD (she/her), previously worked as a university administrator and as community director at ORCID. Today she applies that experience in her role as Senior Program Officer with the OCLC Research Library Partnership, conducting research and developing programming to support 21st century libraries and their parent institutions.
