Since May 9, Research Data Management Support and the Open Science Community Utrecht have been organizing Walk-in hours every Monday afternoon. Researchers and master's students can come here with questions about research data, data storage, AVG, software for research, open science and many more topics you have to deal with in your research. Hanne Oberman walked into the Living Lab that May 9th and shares her experiences.
"For my research at the Missing Data Research Group of Methods & Statistics, I wrote software. Missing data is a big problem for researchers and occurs lol. To deal with this, a lot of software has already been written. Now I mainly deal with the very last step: visualizing missing data problems, evaluating the solutions and statistical analysis of incomplete data. To this end, I have written a package in R (R is a popular programming language for statistical analysis, among other things , ed.). About that software, I had a number of questions, such as: 'How can I make that software as FAIR as possible? Am I perhaps overlooking things that could improve the software? How can I make it easier for other researchers to contribute to it and refer to the software?" When Hanne saw the announcement of the Walk-in hours, she knew: with these questions I'm going there. She especially wanted someone with expertise to think with her. "Because it's a Walk-in hour, I felt the space to go there with a very open attitude."
Hanne works as a junior researcher in the Department of Methods & Statistics at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She will start as a PhD student in January 2023; she is currently still working as a teaching and research assistant. Two days a week she teaches statistics in the social sciences and to applied data science students in natural sciences, two days she works at UMCU as a research assistant and one day a week she is a research assistant in open data analysis software. "A full and very varied week," Hanne says enthusiastically.
The reason Hanne wanted to know how to make her software as FAIR as possible is because she is a big proponent of open science. "I really see that as the future. Right now I'm working on an application for the Open Science Fund to start developing yet another software package together with my supervisor." Because of her background in psychology and the replication crisis that played out within this field around 2010, Hanne sees open science as one of the ways to prevent such a crisis from happening again. "I would so much like to see software published open source as well. SPSS, for example, is a bit of a black box. You teach students how to use it, but actually a lot of information remains hidden. I would love it if software was not only user-friendly, but also if you could look backstage with it." Hanne tells her students that there are alternatives that do allow you to look behind the scenes. "But most undergraduate students are supervised in their thesis by a researcher who works with SPSS himself, so that makes it difficult."
Research engineer Jelle Treep, researcher Hanne Oberman and data manager Neha Moopen during the Walk-in hours in the Living Lab - photo by Annemiek van der Kuil, Photo A
Hanne had another question for the data consultants and research engineers: She would like to create a Shiny app and she wanted to know if that is possible. A Shiny app is an interactive Web application, a user interface that you can build on top of the R programming language. "People who are not familiar with R programming language can still use this app to do analysis in R or view visualizations. Actually, the Shiny app is there for people who can't do R." Hanne's question about the Shiny app was specifically about data privacy. "I would like researchers to be able to upload their data and then create all kinds of data visualizations in the online environment. But Neha and Jelle let me know that there are risks to that. Once you upload research data, you might not comply with the AVG. I asked them, "Can we as Utrecht University provide a secure environment for researchers so that this can still be done? Realizing something like that takes a lot of time. Maybe such an environment will be ready only by the time I finish my PhD."
In addition to detailed answers to her questions, Hanne was sent information via email afterwards. "Both Neha and Jelle emailed me another whole list of resources. How to check if your software is FAIR, for example, about an example of another Shiny app the university built. And how to get a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for your software. How other people can reference your software and even more information about making it FAIR." Hanne was also advised to attend the Best Practices for Writing Reproducible Code workshop.
Why Hanne recommends any researcher with questions about research data and software to go to the Walk-in hours? "It's approachable and I've talked to people who have taken me a step further in my research in the areas of research data, software and open science. Even though I'm already very involved in open science and familiar with many RDM tools, you really don't know everything. Very nice that this interdisciplinary team has such a rich experience and is up to date with the latest developments in data, software and publishing."
