RDAP Happenings January 2025

Hi RDAP members,

As we enter another year, we are grateful to our colleagues and fellow RDAP members who continue to put in the work to better our professional community and the world around us. An example of such work is the RDAP Digitally Accessible Data and Data Repositories Working Group, which is now up and running. Meetings started in November 2024, and the group anticipates working for 12 months as it moves toward final dissemination of its results later this year. As a reminder, the group is charged with summarizing relevant ADA rules, current knowledge and the state of the field on accessibility of repositories and data; and proposing best practices for creating actually accessible research data to assist institutions in complying with ADA. The group as a whole can be contacted at access-wg@rdapassociation.org. Learn more about this working group and other action committees and task forces.

We hope you enjoy this first RDAP newsletter of the new year and we look forward to seeing you all (virtually) in March at the 2025 RDAP Summit!

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Updates from the Board

Happy New Year from the RDAP Executive Board! Wishing you all the best for the year ahead.

As the Executive Board wrapped up 2024, we had great discussions with the Library Data Services (LIDS) research team about the transfer of maintenance of this informative dataset to RDAP. The LIDS dataset gives a snapshot of data services offered by libraries at US R1 and R2 institutions and by maintaining the dataset, we’ll be able to expand the institutions included and see the changes in data services over time. We will be looking for volunteers to help with the update after the Summit as part of our regular volunteer recruitment. 

The Executive Board has also been reviewing our finances for ways to reduce administrative expenses as we start budgeting for our in-person Summit in 2026. We are also continuing our aim to make sure all RDAP working and archival documents are on the RDAP-owned Google Drive. 

The new year brings changes in the wider data landscape as well. The National Science Foundation recently released their new Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) with big changes to the data management and sharing plan section. Thank you to everyone who responded to our call for volunteers to draft a response from the RDAP community which is being organized by Nina Exner and Megan O’Donnell.

If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to check out RDAP’s new website. It looks amazing! Thank you to the Website Committee for all their hard work. Looking forward to seeing many of you at the RDAP Summit in March and the annual business meeting on March 13. A link for the annual business meeting will be sent out to all RDAP members and you are welcome to attend even if you are not able to attend the Summit this year.

The RDAP Executive Board welcomes your input and feedback. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at execboard@rdapassociation.org (or reach out to the President directly at president@rdapassociation.org).

The RDAP Board,

• Tess Grynoch (President) 
• Ali Krzton (President-elect)
• Megan O'Donnell (Secretary)
• Reid Boehm (Treasurer)
• Rachel Woodbrook (Past President)

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RDAP Feature Article

The Turing Way: Towards reproducible, ethical and collaborative research

The Turing Way is an open science, open collaboration, and community-driven project. It is a global community dedicated to making research and data science open, collaborative and ethical for everyone. After five years of existence, The Turing Way has produced several resources in support of open (data) science. You have probably encountered graphics from The Turning Way in presentations over the past several years.They are typically credited as "illustration from Scriberia and the Turing Way Community", such as this example:

The moonshot goal of The Turing Way is to make reproducibility “too easy not to do”. This image was created by Scriberia for The Turing Way community and is used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807

A significant output of this community has been a book, available at https://book.the-turing-way.org/index.html, which provides information for those involved or interested in research on how to make data projects more reproducible and reusable. The Turing Way was developed by a diverse community of contributors in order to make data practices accessible, comprehensible, and effective for as broad an audience as possible. 

The Turing Way book is made up of five guides: Reproducible Research, Project Design, Communication, Collaboration and Ethical Research. These guides introduce good practices and improve research habits within data projects. Topics are introduced in accessible language and paired with curated resources encouraging readers to dive deeper into topics of their choice. All the content, including chapters and images, is available under a CC-BY licence, allowing others to reuse these for their own purposes. The Turing Way is designed to be ever-evolving. We embrace a version-controlled workflow, modelling the principles outlined in the book, allowing us to keep track of how data science practices are changing as well as a history of The Turing Way itself.

Our community members and general audience includes, but are not limited to:, undergrad students, PhD researchers, postdocs, software engineers, project leaders, team coordinators, community managers, data stewards, librarians, data science educators, open science practitioners, and more. As of June 2024, The Turing Way community has been joined by more than 1000 members and the handbook has over 6000 monthly users worldwide.

An example of content created by The Turing Way is the chapter on Research Data Management, which includes information on the FAIR principles, data storage and organisation, curation, and sharing. Sections in this chapter have been added since The Turing Way began, and continue to be extended and updated by a wide variety of experts in data management, such as data stewards, researchers, students, community managers, bioinformaticians, research assistants, and librarians.

An illustration about why Research Data Management is important if you want to be able to use the data of research projects. This image was created by Scriberia for The Turing Way community and is used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807

Role of Community in Advancing Practices

Diversity, intersectionality, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are woven into the fabric of The Turing Way community. The community spaces are purposefully created to ensure the involvement of a diverse range of contributors, representing varied interests and applying equitable approaches in addressing them. Contributors from different domains and expertise are welcomed and supported to collaborate under a Code of Conduct, ensuring enjoyable and safe engagement for everyone in the community. Details about how to contribute to the Turing Way works are outlined in the contribution guidelines.

“All contributions are valued in The Turing Way - from fixing a typo to adding new content and sharing examples from your work. Whatever you can do right now, in this moment, is what we need and what we appreciate.” - The Turing Way

The Turing Way is a living book, written collaboratively by a community of learners, educators and practitioners creating something that is better than what each individual could achieve on their own. As of June 2024, The Turing Way book has been co-authored by more than 450 diverse contributors, details for which are available in the Contributors Records.

The Turing Way book serves as a Digital Public Good and has been listed as one by the Digital Public Good Alliance (DPGA) for its alignment with “Sustainable Development Goals 4 (SDG4): Quality Education”. In this context, The Turing Way acts as a high-quality reference and educational material for people at different stages of their learning in data science.

Getting involved

We invite you to explore the book! If you are looking for information on a particular aspect of open (data) science and you cannot find that information in the book, please help to develop it and join the community!

You can join the Slack channel, sign up for the newsletter, or join an upcoming Collaboration Café (regular online co-working call of the community). Please visit the Start Page for more ways to get involved.

Author biography

Esther Plomb is a member of The Turing Way. If there are questions about this article or about The Turing Way, please reach out to her at e.plomp8@gmail.com

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RDAP Summit Updates

Registration is now open for RDAP Summit 2025, which will take place March 11-13, 2025, with workshops on March 10. Workshop descriptions and a detailed schedule for the Summit are available on the event website.

Summit registration is $30 for members/students/those with a financial hardship (please be sure to log in for membership rates) and $40 for non-members. The deadline to register is March 1, 2025.

RDAP Summit is for all who work toward management, access, and preservation of research data. The program includes presentations, lightning talks, panels, keynotes, and workshops. Optional social activities are also offered.

The theme of RDAP Summit 2025 is “Evolutions in Data Services: Forging Resiliency.” The Call for Proposals solicited presentations that explore concepts such as technical, human, and organizational durability and flexibility in response to challenges and changes in research and data service needs. The Call for Proposals is now closed.

If you have any questions about the Summit, please email rdapsummit@rdapassociation.org.

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Action Committee Updates

DEIA

No updates at this time.

Education and Resources

RDAP is creating a promotion/tenure dossier archive. This members-only resource will let RDAP members view dossiers from other members to help prepare their own portfolios during the promotion/tenure process. Dossiers will be for member-use only and we request that they not be shared further. At this time, we are calling for submissions of successful promotion/tenure dossiers to the archive. We welcome materials from members in tenured/tenure-track positions as well as non-tenured positions that require submission of a portfolio for promotion and continuing appointment.  More information is available through the Resource Hub on the RDAP website.

On January 23, the Education and Resources Committee offered “Accessibly Create & FAIR(ly) Share Visualizations”. In this interactive webinar participants explored strategies to determine the accessibility of a graph, and learned tips for creating accessible graphs. Another opportunity is coming April 22. In the webinar “Mapping your RDM curation skills to historic data: a hands-on introduction to curating analog data,” participants will learn how to critically review historic datasets (both analog and born-digital), how to create adequate metadata to improve discovery and reuse, and what options are available to preserve it for the long-term.

RDAP Webinars are free to attend - register through the RDAP website. If you missed a webinar, past recordings are available to RDAP members through the Resource Hub on the RDAP website.

Marketing

The Marketing is excited to announce the addition of a new co-chair, Kelly Burns from Purdue University Libraries, and a new committee member, Jocelyn Swick-Jemison from University at Buffalo Libraries. 

The Marketing Committee has created a LinkedIn account for RDAP and look forward to engaging with members and potential members there. Please connect with us and share the page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rdap-association/. 

Membership

Please visit our new membership page, which went live this month! Membership has redesigned this page in collaboration with the Website Committee to better highlight the benefits of active RDAP membership.

We have also been working on highlighting founding members through badges in the directory. Founding members are those who joined during the initial member drive and whose donations helped seed the initial costs of forming an independent organization. Founding members retain the status as long as they maintain membership. If there are current members who believe they should have received a badge, they can get in contact with us via the membership email (membership@rdapassociation.org).

Our next news update has to do with the upcoming RDAP Summit! Are you familiar with our Summit Buddy Program? The Summit Buddy program is a way for participants who are new to RDAP to match with someone who has attended an RDAP Summit before. The Buddy Program is flexible and is a great way to expand one’s network. The RDAP Membership Committee hopes the program makes the Summit more inclusive, approachable, and useful for all participants. While there are no formal expectations for the program, we want Buddies to connect with each other. The time commitment for participating in this program is minimal, roughly 2-3 hours over the course of 2 weeks. Sign-ups are through the Summit registration form. We will begin matching mentors to mentees at the end of February until Summit registration closes (on March 1st).

We are also planning the New Member Event for the Summit. New members are encouraged to join us for trivia, prizes, and a chance to meet leadership. Keep an eye out for the date and time when this event will be held during this year’s Summit.

Publishing

We are pleased to share that the 2024 RDAP Summit Special Issue is now published. We thank our longstanding partners at the Journal of eScience Librarianship who have made the publication of this seventh (!) issue possible as well as the members of the RDAP Publishing Committee who served as guest editors. You can access the full edition of the 2024 Special Issue on JeSLIB’s website.

Sponsorship

Our dedicated Sponsorship Committee has been hard at work reaching out to potential sponsors, including both new organizations and those who have supported us in the past. We're thrilled to report that we're making great strides!

A huge thank you to everyone who has shared ideas for potential new sponsors - your input has been invaluable! If you have more suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to the committee at sponsorship@rdapassociation.org.

Website

The Web Committee officially launched the redesign of the RDAP website in mid-December. A major thank you to all the RDAP members who generously provided feedback and suggestions throughout the process, from the initial site architecture review to the final design elements.

The redesign, integrating Bootstrap’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework, allows us to bypass many of the limitations and accessibility issues in the default provider interface. It also enables us to be more flexible and dynamic with how we maintain our content and provides a better structure to introduce new features and member benefits, such as the upcoming Promotion & Tenure documentation.

Do you have feedback on the redesign? Content you found difficult to find? News you’d like us to feature on the homepage? Please get in touch with us via this short feedback form or by emailing webmaster@rdapassociation.org.

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RDAP in the Wild: Member Updates

Got a member update to share? Members are invited to share recent great things you've done or will be doing! Tell us about your data policy papers! Invite us to your forthcoming data webinars! Send us your updates for our next newsletter (due out late April/early May): https://forms.gle/k2Nuciw1sWvLTQoV9.

Conferences and Webinars

February 5/12/19: Data Literacy in Action Webinar Series: From Principles to Practice: Data Literacy in Academic Libraries https://ci.unt.edu/dlcc/webinars/webinar-registration.html 

RESCHEDULED February 11, 2025: Join Kristin Briney and Megan O’Donnell for a webinar on “Making Repositories and Data Digitally Accessible.” https://knowledge.figshare.com/webinar/making-repositories-and-data-digitally-accessible 

New Jobs or Promotions

Ashley Jester has joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute as the Director, Research Data and Library Services and Co-Director, MBLWHOI Library

Corey Barber has joined IU Indianapolis University Library Center for Digital Scholarship as a Data Services Librarian