Eresearch services

About a year ago I posted my two cents worth on what an eresearch support service should look like.

A year or so on, and innumerable conversations with users, potential users and people who are interested I find my views are not much changed:

User wants can be broadly summarised as

• storage
  
  • dropbox like sharing capability
  • lots of it
  • handling of diverse media types (agnostic)
  • assurance it is secure backed up and accessible
• virtual machines
  
  • data analysis & manipulation
• secure long term storage of data
  
  • publication of data for substantiation
  • digital object identifiers
• advice on legacy data
  
  • format conversion
  • media conversion
  • digitisation
  • some bespoke programming, data wrangling etc

Dropbox is extremely popular because of its ease of use and universality, meaning people can share data from the field with colleagues, with colleagues overseas etc.

I have a second life in which I review books - it’s noticable that in the past year publishers have moved from sending you the epub or mobi version to sharing it with you via dropbox. I don’t see any reason why researchers should be any different in their habits.

This ease of sharing and the fact that Dropbox is hosted outwith Australia is something that of course gives intellectual property managers the willies, but it is also a fact of life, and something that has to be dealt with - in other words, as Dropbox is already out there in the wild, what ever is provided as a replacement has to be at least as good, and at least as flexible - which of course means it will bring the same intellectual property concerns.

And of course it’s not just Dropbox, we can say the same about Evernote, OneDrive, OneNote and Google Drive.

However in the course of my conversations one thing that comes up over and over again is the need for decent work in progress storage, and work in progress storage into which it is easy to load data, either by direct capture from instruments, or by some easy finder/file manager like process - people expect to be able to drag’n’drop and tellin them about some command line incantation with rsync doesn’t play.

There is an interest in data publication, but at the moment it’s basically driven by journals requiring that data has to be made available, but I expect that this will build as more and more journals require this. I also expect to see more interest in publishing source code and things like R scripts as part of the whole substantiation and open review thing.

There’s also an undercurrent of people wanting to return to research they did earlier and finding themselves locked out of their data because it’s been stored on media no longer in common use - such as zip drives, or in older data formats that made sense at the time. We could rehearse the open formats argument here, but that doesn’t fix the problem, which needs to be addressed. Allied to this is the need for a little bespoke programming or data wrangling to get data into a usable format, or to clean data.

So, one year on I’d say change hasn’t happened, but there’s nothing to say that it won’t …

Written with StackEdit.