The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced a new investment to improve the way UK university researchers manage their data. As a result of this initiative, climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) will soon be demonstrating new methods of providing open access to research data.
Climate scientists have reportedly been under the spotlight recently. There have been technical and cultural challenges to making data and methods openly available, and a perception of failure to do so has been taken by critics of mainstream climate science as an indication of unsound science. By funding projects which will improve practice and will give climate scientists and others better guidance on research data management, JISC aims to help them make that data more usable and valuable.
Three independent reviews focused on hacked e-mails from climate scientists at UEA. The reviews found that the CRU researchers' scientific rigour and honesty was not in doubt, but the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee said that climate scientists should take even more steps to make available all their supporting data - right down to the computer codes they use - in order that research findings should be properly verifiable.
The Climatic Research Unit at UEA, in partnership with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) e-Science Centre, is now embarking on a JISC-funded project that will address this recommendation. The centre provides computing, data storage and networking infrastructure for today's advanced science facilities. Building on previous work between the two organisations, the project will examine how best to expose climate data for re-use, make it easier for researchers to cite the data and also to understand its validity. The results will be exploited by the British Atmospheric Data Centre, who already provide access to a significant proportion of the climate data output of the UK research community.
The UEA team, led by Dr. Tim Osborn, is one of eight departments around the country who will be working towards models of better data management practice and making data more openly available for reuse in universities across the UK.
Other universities involved in this innovative research are the Universities of Bath, Cambridge, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Southampton and King's College London. The subject areas covered include materials science, freshwater biology, epidemiology and data intensive modelling to predict disease. All the projects are exploring ways of making data and the code used for computer assisted analysis more openly available, in some cases by linking them to publications.
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