ARC Funding Rules - perspectives on data management
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Robertson, Douglas
Thurbon, Joe
Withers, Justin
Laughlin, Greg
To continue to foster a culture of good data management and practices by both data generators and users the latest version of ARC funding rules now further clarify the ARC's data management expectations. Researchers are now required as part of the application process for National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP) funding to outline how they plan to manage research data arising from ARC-funded research. Whilst the ARC is not mandating open data, the revised wording encourages researchers to consider the ways in which they can best manage, store, disseminate and re-use data generated through ARC-funded research. This webinar explored: - the support strategies being planned by various areas who work with ARC applications - recent ARC Funding Rules changes as they apply to research data, with a particular emphasis on Data Management Plans.
 This is part of a series of webinars and other support events and materials provided by ANS. And this particular webinar is part of a little mini series, following up on the changes that have happened at the ARC recently. So last time we actually had people from the ARC presenting and talking about the changes themselves. This time we've got people from the sector just to really exchange experience what's happening and how people are reacting to these changes. We have with us today some special guests, Dr Douglas Robertson. Hello Douglas. Hello, how are you? Yeah, Douglas is the director of research services at the Australian National University. We also have Joe Thurbin, who is the member services manager at Intersect. Joe, are you with us? Hello, hello. Oh, yes, I am now. I was muted. Thanks for joining us, Joe. Are you in Sydney today? Actually on the Gold Coast, Southern Cross City Gold Coast Campus. Ah, okay. So Joe's here to talk from the perspective of Intersect, which is a new research provider in the New South Wales area. But obviously has tentacles all over Australia. We also have Justin with us with us. He won't be presenting anything particular today, but he is the ARC branch manager or acting for the strategy branch. And he's happy to take any questions that come up about particular technical questions to do with the ARC changes. Thanks, I do. Justin is here. Good. And we also have Greg Lachlan here today from ANZ, the principal policy advisor with ANZ. And we'll probably get a little overview of when Greg as to how things have changed. We'll start with that. We'll go to some discussion with Joe and Douglas, and then we'll move to your questions from the audience. So Greg, we can assume that everyone was here with us last week when we really went into detail about the changes. We'll have a little overview of what's changed and what's really bringing, what are the issues that are bringing us together. Okay, Adrian, we will. We heard in some detail from the ARC last week and therefore today's more the sort of the application side. So I'll be fairly brief, but just to make sure we all know what has changed. Two things that have changed are the funding rules and the application templates. And they are not for everything at this present time there for discovery, grants and soon linkage grants starting in 2015. So let's look at the funding rules and I said this will be brief and it will. Here are the funding rules. There's the reference down the bottom page 18. It's a quote. The ARC strongly encourages the depositing of data arising from a project, a funded project, an appropriate publicly accessible subject and or institutional repository. So that is a new rule. Now let's look to the application form. This comes from three sources, but it's all ARC applicants are now required to outline their plans for the management of data from the proposed because it's application stage. So proposed research, including but not limited to storage, access and reuse arrangements. They are the ARC words. The outline of we've got outline stroke plan here because the outline is just an outline of the plan. It could improve the competitiveness of your application by contributing to some of the key criteria which ARC judge applications. Of course, our wider benefits as well. But when asked about, you know, would a good outline lead to a better result of the answer is it could depending on disciplinary practices. This is from the FAQs. The answers should focus on plans or your plans to make the data as openly accessible as possible for the purposes of the verification and for the future conduct of research by others. So these are important signals. Now you do have to complete the data management section in the application form. It's presumably short, half a page or so. The publication of your data is not mandatory. It's sort of strongly recommended and the ARC recognizes that there are differences in practice and principles between disciplines, institutions and individuals. Now that bottom small text to my words. That means that implies that the effectiveness of your outline or plan is guided or will be guided by disciplinary norms and practices. I think that is a summary of the changes. Yeah, that's right. And just to flag there in response to that, there's lots of people all over Australia doing all sorts of things in response to these changes here at ANZ. We've produced a two page guide. It's meant really to help us support the support staff at universities is not really necessarily meant for individual researchers. It's to put stuff in the hands of research office or library or your research or whoever is assisting research staff at the different universities. So we just said that a new resource have a shamelessly taking advantage of the opportunity to plug something new there. And we will follow this up with more detailed resources and support and partnerships with each of the universities for the successful applicants or for the projects that even without funding are still going to go ahead in some modified form. And that's where you get down to not just an outline of a plan, but really, OK, what is the plan and how do we do that more on the support for man's a little bit later. Let's get down to the subject matter today. So there are the changes that let's start with you. So what's happening at the ANU in response to these particular changes? I think it's important to recognize that the RC action is just part of a growing movement that's been happening globally. So so the RC thankfully has taken a very sensible approach to this, which is to go with that tide of change and not to impose a mandatory set of requirements before we truly understand the implications. All data management, data curation and data access. As the RC have said, there's massive differences between disciplines. One of the things we're doing at ANU and we were doing this prior to the RC changes is to have a series of workshops and to exchange best practice between different individuals within the institution. It's important to recognize, I think that as far as the research community is concerned, you know, this may be new for. Research offices, but it's not new for a lot of researchers. A lot of researchers already commit to open access repository and astrophysics or astronomy in the digital humanities. So there's a lot of effective stuff already happening for those researchers that are already active filling in the section and the RC is not an issue. And the last thing you want is to impose some kind of institutional norm on it, which doesn't take account of these disciplinary differences. But for those that maybe are kind of not being exposed to the issues around open data management and data curation, then it's a matter of just engaging in conversation with them and the ANS guide, you know, and all those kind of things just help to help people make more be more aware. So I think it's, you know, it's a kind of work in progress, if you like, and we're just contributing to that by trying to open up the debate. I am really keen to make sure this isn't seen in the research community as the research office seeking to command and control the research and how it develops. But it is important that we provide effective support to researchers so that those that are struggling have access to either support from the research office, but probably more appropriate support from researchers in their own discipline that can actually provide them the guidance that's much more contextual than most research offices could ever recognize. I mean, we're dealing with data sets that go from in terms of data commons at ANU, which is some of our kind of data archiving, you're going from things of kind of bilingual texts around Byzantine documents to weather data to space and astronomy data. It is a huge panoply of research data, and they all have different requirements, and they also have different needs to share and to share when I think one of the big debates I'm kind of suppose having with myself in some senses is trying to figure out how you take account of when data should be shared, as opposed to just the mantra that sharing data is good. I think most researchers would agree that science is meant to be an open enterprise and therefore sharing data is good. But we do have to recognize that in the context of academic promotions, publications are still the primary mechanism. And therefore, if you share your data before you've published, then actually other researchers can, without having sweated anything into the creation of the data set, they can gain the publication benefit from it. And for that reason, data citation is also going to be increasingly important in the future in order to make sure that these things are good. So Joe, what about the intersect? What's the mood there? What are the intersect staff doing in response to this? So I guess I'd start by echoing what's already been seen before. It's very much a case that we're trying to support researchers in helping them secure and share their data. A lot of researchers see great value in that, and those that don't, I guess, will either eventually see value or won't, but you can't make people do things. If it's okay, I'll start by saying, hey, thanks very much for giving the opportunity to speak and briefly explain what intersect is for those who don't have that context. So we're a not-proper company. We were founded in 2008 and we're now a consortium of 11 universities and four affiliate members. And the company mission is to deliver research impact through e-research. So that's why the members pay their subscription fees. We're big enough now to provide a whole bunch of services to our members to help them achieve that goal. And I'm only going to talk about the ones that are relevant to assisting our members with responding to these data management changes in the funding rules. But before I do that, I'd just like to make a couple of quick observations. One is that we operate in a really interesting environment where we're trying to help 11 different universities respond to these changes. And each of those universities is in a really different place internally. Some of our member universities, when these changes came through, more or less said, yeah, no, we've got them under control. We've got very well-advanced data management policies. We can help intersect. We don't need much help from you for these changes. We just need you as an infrastructure partner. Others intersect heavily involved with the research office and library in IT. The next observation I wanted to make is that responding to these changes, we're going to do very little to help researchers directly that we don't already do. And most of our work happens in really close partnership with the research support structures inside the university. And now I'm thinking mostly about the library and IT services and the research office. But each of our members has at least one novel take on the best way to support research through technology. The other observation I wanted to make was that research data requirements really sit on a spectrum from very simple to either not very much data or a reasonable amount of data that's all quite homogeneous, right through to extremely complex data. So either that it's very, very large or that it's wildly heterogeneous or that it needs to be near large computing facilities. So the governing principle that we work with our members on is that the most valuable thing that we can do is to assist in situations where either the institution or the researcher has a mismatch between what they can do for themselves and the complexity of the research data managing issues they face. And that's the governing principle for all of the work that we do. So there's a cohort of researchers who we help and they've been the ones who up to now have been the ones we've helped the most. And they sit right at the complex end of the spectrum. And so for those researchers, they will have, and this is already been said, they'll have very little adjustment to make to meet these new funding rules. But for them, we act as a development partner. So we build software systems for them. We act as an infrastructure partner. So we'll store their hundreds of terabytes of data. All provide aspects of research advice for their grant proposals. But it's very much working one-on-one with a research group. And we have a lot of capability or at very least understand that they've got a really difficult problem solved and working with them individually. And to put some figures against that, in the last quarter we've helped about 40 grant applications go through the pipeline through centers of research excellence, data discovery, LEAP and various state proposals. And that work will happen in close collaboration with the research officer and our members. To give two concrete examples, one, the top one is the Strain Schizophrenia Research Bank. Which is a software project that we've been working on over the last four or five years with the Australian Schizophrenia Research Institute. And below is some work that we're currently doing with some big data, some big data work that's happening through the Lowe Institute in New South Wales. So that's the context. And so what are we doing now? So what we're doing at the moment is trying to help members respond systematically to these ARC funding rule changes. And at most institutions what we're doing is trying to provide that baseline support for all those researchers who operate at that simple end of the research data spectrum. The ones who don't have a lot of data or that the data is relatively straightforward. Because the data being simple doesn't mean that the data is not valuable. The data is still very valuable. And so a very large cohort of researchers, and we're doing two things to help institutions. The first is that we need to help researchers understand when we meet researchers, we need to help them understand that there's a very basic layer of support that's offered by the institution. And that layer of support actually provides the mechanisms of a basic research data management plan. And then they can put an outline of that into their research data application. We're making sure that researchers understand that they need to provide a safe home for their data and tend to it in an orderly manner. We need them to understand that there are places that they can register their data and they should say that they will. And that they can and they should make their data available to share, at least when they finish their project. The back half of that is to provide the institution with a set of processes and infrastructure so that the researchers can make good on that commitment. Because the researchers were encouraging them to make commitments to the ARC when they put in their grant application. And so we're also working closely with the universities and also closely with the And on the Ground staff in New South Wales to help universities answer questions like, can our IET infrastructure actually support the simple research hosting task? Or do we need an infrastructure partner? And then working closely with the library and research office and IT services to work out who is going to provide the assistance for the researcher to make good on these commitments that they're making. And finally and possibly most importantly, how do our researchers self assess whether they have a simple or complex data requirement? And I'm really delighted to see the And's guidelines come out today so we'll be making full use of those. I'd like to spend one more minute to talk about what's happening in the future. And this is some activity that we've just got underway and it's again in close collaboration with And. Is that data research endeavors involved in the complexity of the data management challenges that people face get larger. And so we need a program of work to help researchers who are facing increased complexity move along this spectrum to become data aware researchers. They're putting into place a bunch of training material that helps researchers with moderate data problems put together their own research data management plans. So we've got a really well established learning and development program. Last year we trained about 500 researchers in all sorts of research techniques and we'll be rolling that out over the next short time with our members. Two things I'd like to say and this in some sense is a bit of a call to arms. So all of the intersex training material is made available under creative comments licensing. And secondly for our friends interstate, we're really happy, in fact really keen to work together to put together materials, make it of a high quality so that this is an area where we can get significant economies out of sharing. It's a great idea, Joe, and we're very happy to help to see that sort of cross pollination across the second. And so that's a more summary, which I think I've had just about enough time. I would like to show one more slide, which I think is my favorite slide at the moment. And this one, this is a graph of retractions. So the black line is how many papers get published and the blue and the red lines are how many papers get retracted. They're on different scales, so don't worry that they intersect. But somewhere around 1995 something happened and the number of retractions has skyrocketed since. And I like to think that part of what's happened is that there's a lot more collaborating around data and there's a lot more people checking other people's work. And this is a symptom in the large of science working properly. And I think that as data is shared more widely, this trend will increase. And this is part of the part of the reason I think by the I.C. is absolutely right to be strongly encouraging the positive of data. And our challenge, I think, is to make it as easy as possible for researchers to do that, but also to help them see value in doing it as well. And that's that's more or less what our program of work is meant to achieve. Thanks, Joe. It's an important point that's a good slide that the a lot of this is not necessarily only about reuse of data, but it's about the integrity of science and the openness with a scientific method in that sense, you know, from across all disciplines and being able to show that the conclusions you came to were based on on something and be able to share that. I mean, there's a there's an excellent report called Science as an Open Enterprise produced by the Royal Society in London. And it seemed it's kind of follows the trajectory of this slide from Joe, that we had to remind ourselves that science was meant to be an open enterprise. And with the pressure to kind of compete almost at one stage, probably a few years ago getting rather too intense, we're now in a phase of much stronger collaboration, which I think is just, you know, we have to remember the fundamentals of good science is your data should be reproducible, and it should be open to challenge. And therefore, all of the all of these moves are just reminding us of what founded science many centuries ago, and the principles that founded science was sharing your work and having critique of your work. And in order to critique your work, it's not critiquing the publication is critiquing the whole package. I think I think this is this is you know, this is why it's a it's a kind of seems to be a no brainer that people should support these moves. We do have to make sure that we do them sensitively and appropriately. Is a very great generalization how or how the applicants reacting to the new one. I think as you'd expect range of human beings with a range of traits from respect to kind of reflects their data savviness to some extent. Some is no problem whatsoever. To others they're kind of saying well, I've always done this and my publications have always been well regarded. Why do we have to do this. To some extent they're not wrong, because some of the publications are sufficiently clear that you don't actually need access to primary data. And it's more for reuse that you access to primary data rather than for validation. I am concerned that there's increasing number of publications, particularly the life sciences from what one reads in nature and elsewhere, that they the date the publication is not sufficiently complete to know that it's reproducible. And a couple of recent nature papers, the one nature paper, they could only reproduce 11% of advanced cancer studies in another study by I think it was AstraZeneca the pharmaceutical company, they could only replicate from publications eight out of 56 in fantasies and biosciences. And that to some extent is kind of this kind of competitive edge where people maybe don't want to disclose absolutely everything until they've kind of milked it to get maximum profile. Thankfully, that's a rare phenomenon, I think. But nonetheless, it's a phenomenon we have to be aware of. And we have to make sure that science is as beyond reproach as possible. And in this system that's, you know, that we're talking about here that application data management, the lucky, the good thing, the good design in this is that it is very sensitive to the different discipline requirements and it's the peers from a particular panel that are applying the norms of that particular area. You know, I always get concerned when it says a consequence of a new funding rule or a new regulation that we assume this is the first time the sector has paid attention to something, which is not the case. There are many, many researchers have already got their very data savvy. And therefore we shouldn't think that just because the ARC has introduced a funding rule that this is novel, this is new. What is new is the requirement to answer a question in the application, which is healthy. And Joe, what's, do you have a feeling for the temperature of things with applicants? What's the feedback? Absolutely. I think there's probably three cohorts that are kind of a bit different. So there's one set who will happily comply. They don't necessarily see a huge amount of value in it for them, but, you know, they're happy to do it. For them, it's about, I'm already pretty busy. Can you give me as much help as you can both in terms of writing a grant and then complying later on? I think there's a range of cohorts that you just have no interest. But there's some, I think right at the other end of the spectrum who see this as a strategic area, and again, this is not new for them, a strategic area where they can compete internationally. So being known as a source of data or a discipline is something that people are interested in and something that RDSI is really right in their initial rhetoric about saying, this is the place where you put collections that are significant. And no, that's not the word in the news anymore. But some researchers really latched onto that and said, well, I can actually use the fact that this is in Australia's national repository of significant research data as a lever in my negotiations with potential collaborators. Some people are really engaged with it, not just as a greater good idea, but also as an idea of strategic importance for their research. So you really do cover the full gamut. The place where we get the strongest reaction is where there's a mismatch between how valuable I say it for themselves and how much effort they've got to expend. I think one of the other interesting phenomenons that we're recognizing is kind of engagement with participants in research. The data part of this is kind of what's produced. But we're seeing an increasing number of studies that are consulting about the research they intend to undertake on the participants that they may actually be studying as part of the project. And that brings in this issue of public sharing of data. So there's making data publicly available, but it's also making it accessible to those that are non specialist. So that's a key issue. How much stuff do you have to put around the data to make it truly available to the public as opposed to publicly available, which are two very different things. Yeah, that's right. I think we're really at very early days and trying to understand that except in a few disciplines, which I've already, and that's a key example is an excellent version of working probably with a community of researchers, but also with a community of other professionals. What about your own staff, the research office and support staff? How did they feel about this? I think the challenge for research offices is that, you know, as kind of pressures on budgets fight, but demands for more support increases. It does mean that research offices can be under considerable pressure. I think the important thing for from a research office perspective is to recognize that this isn't their problem. It's a research community issue. And certainly at ANU, we collaborate extensively with the library and that collaboration is very, very healthy. They've been working in data and archiving data far more than research offices have. And therefore it's important, but the research office is not seen as the single point of knowledge. But in terms of the staff, I think what we need to do is we need to increase the training and the visibility for those staff. And I'm pretty sure this will probably be on the arms conference agenda when the conference is in Canberra in September. But we do need to make research offices more aware. But they've got lots of other things that are having to be more and more aware of these days as the world gets increasingly complex. So it's a pretty high pressure place to be. And you can come across some researchers that are quite emotional in this space, both in favor and against. And that can put pressure on trying to introduce them to the needs of the ARC, but also get them to try and take account of the changes that are happening in the global research community. And certainly we wish ANU to be and to continue to be at the cutting edge of that community and not to be one of a leading pack as opposed to a fallen pack. Joe, is that different for any research support provider? Is there a different kind of challenge for the staff there? I think it is because we're one more step removed. The key challenge for us is understanding what the institution's response is and helping in the most appropriate way. There's always tempting to try to find a one size fits all solution. And that just doesn't work. So we're in constant dialogue with our member unions, especially the research office at the moment, trying to work out the place where we fit in. In some sense, it's the unenviable task of trying to make ourselves obsolete every time we go and help someone by raising the internal capabilities of groups that do this sort of stuff. And the issue for many research offices is they become trapped into a world of being compliance monitors, which is not an appropriate way to structure. Compliance is a necessary evil. You do have to have compliance. You do have to fit all the rules that exist. And you get concerned that sometimes there are rather too many rules and we're making the world a bit too complicated. But we have to play the game by the rules that are set. But it is about recognizing the research office as part of a support infrastructure. One aspect of which is compliance. But the danger with compliance is you lead to a kind of lowest threshold of performance. So do you comply? Yes. That means it's ticked so you don't do anymore. But in the world of research data, there are much bigger issues than mere compliance. The ARC is following the global trend. And for Australia, we need to make sure that Australia is really committing to open access and open data as part of science as an open enterprise. And research offices are only a small part of that equation. They're not the single point of all solutions. So just before we go off to the questions from the audience, just one other reflection. We've been focusing a little bit on the research management. So the management of data section, the new requirement to have an outline of a plan and the repercussions of that. There are some more fundamental changes that Greg referred to at the beginning around just an overall reminder from the ARC that you have responsibilities according to the code. And that you are strongly encouraged, wherever appropriate to deposit in a publicly accessible repository. How do you see those longer term changes affecting the role of research office tug-of-war? Is that you will be required if research data is one of the reportable outputs? What repercussions does that have for a research office where data could be anywhere in the world in one sense, not just neatly stored in journal publication? Honest answers I don't really know. I do get concerned when I hear about pressure on institutional repositories because my view is it doesn't matter where stuff is as long as it's in a good place with good infrastructure and it's accessible. So I'm glad to see the ARC have the requirement to be either in an institutional repository or in a disciplined or other publicly accessible repository. Because there's a lot of really excellent stuff happening within disciplines and we need to make sure that this isn't about institutional control, or the single repository thinking of it as something physical. I am concerned about the potential build up through time, not so much on pressure on the research office but pressure on supporting the research infrastructure. And therefore we need to be quite agile in our solutions making best use of repositories that exist elsewhere and having good metadata accessible through an institutional source, but not necessarily actually thinking that everything has to be brigade into a single piece of institutional infrastructure. As I understand it, in many branches of physics there are major data archives that already existed for years and they don't exist necessarily with Australia, they can be on the east and the east coast of the USA. And it's really important that we make best use of the global infrastructure and we don't create a non-necessary infrastructure burden on Australian institutions without making full use of that which is available internationally. The pressure on research budgets is intense. The cost of research will continue to rise ahead of the normal rate of inflation and the cost of providing infrastructure will continue to rise. And it's not so much that the costs in this space need necessarily be large, but it's when you add them to all the other costs that with an efficiency gain in the sector, there are real pressure points in funding. We all have to be aware of including the AARC. And Joe, from an research provider point of view, what's the longer term shift there to depositing data after a project? How do you see that playing out from an intersect point of view? I don't think I can add to what's already been said. I think that's bang on the money. I think the most value for research data is where researchers can find it. And fragmenting stuff across institutional repositories I think can make sense in some certain cases, but fundamentally researchers are driven by community and collaboration. And I think the natural order of things will be for the specific repositories that people understand how to get to. The other aspect of our thinking data citation, I'm not sure how much research data will actually get searched for that's not cited. I think the fundamental cognitive mindset of how researchers find interesting other research through the literature. And I think that's a really important part of whatever happens. But really I'm just finessing the edges of what's already been said. Thanks Joe. Before we go off to the questions, Justin, was there anything that came in that conversation there that you'd like to comment on or clarify or anything, any thoughts that that provoked? I'd just like to say it's very encouraging to see the level of acceptance and interest across the sector. It's fantastic to see, I guess, the preparedness or hear of the preparedness generally speaking out there. And the discussion at the moment is reflective of the fact that there is a flexibility and approach across disciplines in which data is managed and considered. And that's why we haven't made it a mandate. Basically, we'll leave that up to the experts in the disciplines out there to decide best practice and how to store, disseminate and make accessible the data that's generated from their research project. So all in all, I think it's moving very well in the right direction. Thanks Justin. All right. So we did have a couple of questions here. The question is, is the IRC going to fund existing repositories or the building of new repositories to cater for the increased demand generated by this policy change? Perhaps that's a question for Justin. There's no intention at the moment to provide additional funds under any of our projects for the development of specific infrastructure. That being said, if there is a advantageous reason to seek funding for that basis, we would, I guess, consider it as part as a normal leaf round. Yeah, and certainly the larger infrastructure question requires some kind of coordination. If there are these, if this is the growing expectation, and we talked about that last time we were here that, you know, this is a social trend that's just watching over all of research. If that is the trend, then obviously not all of that can be taken, not all the infrastructure requirements in there can be taken up by the IRC. Now, there's probably some opportunities within the IRC, but obviously it needs to be taken into account for the whole sort of planning of research infrastructure. I know that IRC is one part of the infrastructure funding, but you know, there are important parts, you know, for example, of Encriss, that some of this infrastructure needs to be at least brought to bear on this problem. And I think it comes back to your point before, Doug, was about finding the infrastructure that's appropriate and that's easy and that's natural for researchers to use and using that in the most efficient way. And my understanding is that if you have substantial costs that fall within the project that are required and can be justified in line with normally IRC requirements, you can build those costs into the proposal. But of course, in the vast majority of projects, the substantial costs fall outside the project period. And, you know, I do think, for the good of Australia, we need a really sensible debate about research infrastructure, which this is the part. And the other point that I would make is I think the, you know, there's a real huge increase in the volume of search data. In the number of research meetings I've been in recently and a whole variety of disciplines, I kind of almost hate the words, but big data comes up every time, the challenges of big data. How are we going to integrate different data sets in order to have more probing research questions? And I think we're really just at the start of the discussion around data and data infrastructure. But it's important for Australia that we can hold our head up in world science, and I use science in the German sense of the word meaning all disciplines, that we can hold our head up international. And I am concerned about the research infrastructure questions. And the other coordinating point I think that's over the last year or so the chief scientist has been interested in that coordination of the requirements of science and infrastructure and there are quite a few reports out there in the National Research Investment Plan. So there were mentions there of what infrastructure is required for these kind of open data policies. I've also mentioned open source and I think it's fundamental that as much of these developments in different institutions within Australia is open source in order that we can all stand on each other's shoulders and therefore stand out internationally as best in class, rather than seeing it as a game to be one up on somebody in this particular area of infrastructure. I think it's much more important to act as a collective than it is to act as an individual institution. All right, there's another question here, not so much a question, but a comment on timeframes. Our research officer runs internal EOI processes for pre filtering ARC applications. I've been interested in knowing how common this is at other places. So what this has meant in practice is that our internal deadlines of these have now already passed for discovery and are coming up soon tomorrow for discovery early career research awards and Decro. Information provided by our CEG, the FAQs and by ANS, including these webinars, unfortunately came a bit late for us to provide effective support in this time round. But we have done our best. Is it the intention to provide this kind of information a bit earlier next year? So look from our point of view, this is now a part of the furniture and we're providing this kind of support from now on. This is just a line in the sand and these funding schemes can come due at different times of the year and we should be ready now, I think, from now on to provide that support when it's actually required. Everything is cumulative. You have to start at some point and the good news is we've started. And I think from an ARC perspective, it's not so much this set of deadlines, which will really say how much has been kind of advanced. It's how that changes over the next two, three, four years and how the data management section becomes more refined and more and more elegant as more sharing of the benefits done. I would counsel just to ask the ARC to make sure that they are open and sharing in the views of the assessors when they are even though it's not a formal part of the assessment, I would want them to make some general observations from different funding rounds on what the assessors found with regard to data management plans, where there are any developments that looked really exciting and interesting that people should be aware of. Because the ARC is in a very privileged position in receiving the best researchers across Australia submitting proposals to them and therefore they have an integrating role to make best use of the knowledge in front of them. And that's just not a proposals that are funded, but maybe proposals that have exceptionally good sections in data management and seeking ways to share those. So again, it commits to this open source environment where we're sharing best practice. Yes, we're establishing in one sense the kind of precedence and standards will be developed through those decisions there. It's not about the individual project and individual proposal, it's about the research system as a whole. We're committed to the open data and we will be actually looking and monitoring its effect on applications even when they do come in. And if we do need to provide further advice and examples, we will definitely be looking at the opportunity to do that. Yeah, and I think one of your mechanisms is through the ARC Open Day. And can't remember there being a substantive section on open data and open access. And I think it would merit animation through that set of mechanisms as well as others. Yeah, we're continually trying to liaise with the sector as much as possible on these new initiatives. We actually have disclosed the survey with the call, the Council of Australian University Librarians, primarily on open access, but there was a couple of questions in that survey regarding the data preparedness and archiving and the like. So there will be some information that's useful that comes out of that as well. Yeah, and the ARC's approach is welcomed I think, certainly by me in terms of the way you're approaching this generally. Okay, last question here. Question for Jo Thurman. What do you think happened in 2008, 2010, which resulted in far fewer papers being retracted? So I think that was the... Oh yeah, that's a great question. So there was a rise from 1996, but then a fall from 2010? The average period between a paper being published and retracted is four and a half years. So that fall is just we haven't found them yet. What a shame. But that's a terrific question. Good. I'm going to say we, it's not actually my job to find them. That's right. You're job to show the slides. Anything else? All that? Any other comments there? Good. So I just remind you of the ANTH support around this. We have basically a set of resources and you'll see those on the screen now for the data management and funder requirements. The guide that we talked about earlier is on the second URL that's on the screen now, the data management slash funding. And you'll find our particular guide there because it's particularly to do with one of the funder's requirements. We're running again these kind of events and webinars and I'm very happy to hear your ideas if you want to have a discussion about X, please contact us. Or if you think it would be great to hear from Y, please tell us. We're very keen that the subject matter of these webinars should be really decided on by the community. And then the third leg of support is the consultancies, both on these short term requirements during the funding submission season and longer term, you know, how can a university really undertake its responsibilities under the code of responsible conductive research. And quite happy to have these long term partnerships with universities to really bed down all different policy and practice and culture change and infrastructure that might be required around the longer term change here. You know, and with in mind to be able to build up the profile and collaboration and return on investment that comes with research data. I think that's all. So we do have a couple of upcoming webinars we've got. You can see the one screen there you go to the site there you'll find out what's coming up soon. There's a webinar coming up towards the end of this month with Max Wilson from University College London. And that's broadly around institutional support for data management. So that sounds like a really interesting one that's coming up fairly soon. Thank you very much, Douglas. It's been really great to have you here and get that sort of inside of you. If people wanted to contact you further about the kinds of things there, how would they through that? That was dot romerton at ANU dot EDU dot EU happy to receive any emails positive or negative. Good. That's good. And Joe, thank you very much. It's because of very refreshing sort of insight into how a state based research support provider is active in this area. So thank you very much for that. If people have questions or want to take up offers of intersex services, how would they contact you, Joe? They can have a contact me at Joe dot furbon at intersex.org.au or if they're in the world, just make contact with their local research analyst. Okay. And Justin, thank you very much again for sitting in and terrifying and use those points there from the ACARC's perspective to get the ACARC perspective. Justin, what's the is there a particular website or somewhere you guide people towards? Basically go to the frequently asked questions on our discovery projects at this stage will provide some information on our expectations. If there's any specific questions, you can always email info at ACARC dot com dot au. Excellent. But I'd just like to say how how encouraging it is to see the interest and the positive interest in the sector with the introduction of this requirement. Yes, it is very good. You know, we can see the number of people that are, you know, contacting and and these webinars, etc. So it's certainly of interest and not a kind of negative interest. It's an interesting or here's a good challenge and how do we how do we address these this new challenge and opportunity. Thank you very much. Thank you, Greg. Thank you for your time. Excellent background and some great insights. And thanks to the audience terrific inputs. And we'll see you at our next virtual event. Thanks for that. Bye bye.
 This is part of a series of webinars and other support events and materials provided by ANS.  And this particular webinar is part of a little mini series, following up on the changes that have happened at the ARC recently.  So last time we actually had people from the ARC presenting and talking about the changes themselves.  This time we've got people from the sector just to really exchange experience what's happening and how people are reacting to these changes.  We have with us today some special guests, Dr Douglas Robertson.  Hello Douglas.  Hello, how are you?  Yeah, Douglas is the director of research services at the Australian National University.  We also have Joe Thurbin, who is the member services manager at Intersect.  Joe, are you with us?  Hello, hello.  Oh, yes, I am now.  I was muted.  Thanks for joining us, Joe.  Are you in Sydney today?  Actually on the Gold Coast, Southern Cross City Gold Coast Campus.  Ah, okay.  So Joe's here to talk from the perspective of Intersect, which is a new research provider in the New South Wales area.  But obviously has tentacles all over Australia.  We also have Justin with us with us.  He won't be presenting anything particular today, but he is the ARC branch manager or acting for the strategy branch.  And he's happy to take any questions that come up about particular technical questions to do with the ARC changes.  Thanks, I do.  Justin is here.  Good.  And we also have Greg Lachlan here today from ANZ, the principal policy advisor with ANZ.  And we'll probably get a little overview of when Greg as to how things have changed.  We'll start with that.  We'll go to some discussion with Joe and Douglas, and then we'll move to your questions from the audience.  So Greg, we can assume that everyone was here with us last week when we really went into detail about the changes.  We'll have a little overview of what's changed and what's really bringing, what are the issues that are bringing us together.  Okay, Adrian, we will.  We heard in some detail from the ARC last week and therefore today's more the sort of the application side.  So I'll be fairly brief, but just to make sure we all know what has changed.  Two things that have changed are the funding rules and the application templates.  And they are not for everything at this present time there for discovery, grants and soon linkage grants starting in 2015.  So let's look at the funding rules and I said this will be brief and it will.  Here are the funding rules.  There's the reference down the bottom page 18.  It's a quote.  The ARC strongly encourages the depositing of data arising from a project, a funded project, an appropriate publicly accessible subject and or institutional repository.  So that is a new rule.  Now let's look to the application form.  This comes from three sources, but it's all ARC applicants are now required to outline their plans for the management of data from the proposed because it's application stage.  So proposed research, including but not limited to storage, access and reuse arrangements.  They are the ARC words.  The outline of we've got outline stroke plan here because the outline is just an outline of the plan.  It could improve the competitiveness of your application by contributing to some of the key criteria which ARC judge applications.  Of course, our wider benefits as well.  But when asked about, you know, would a good outline lead to a better result of the answer is it could depending on disciplinary practices.  This is from the FAQs.  The answers should focus on plans or your plans to make the data as openly accessible as possible for the purposes of the verification and for the future conduct of research by others.  So these are important signals.  Now you do have to complete the data management section in the application form.  It's presumably short, half a page or so.  The publication of your data is not mandatory.  It's sort of strongly recommended and the ARC recognizes that there are differences in practice and principles between disciplines, institutions and individuals.  Now that bottom small text to my words.  That means that implies that the effectiveness of your outline or plan is guided or will be guided by disciplinary norms and practices.  I think that is a summary of the changes.  Yeah, that's right.  And just to flag there in response to that, there's lots of people all over Australia doing all sorts of things in response to these changes here at ANZ.  We've produced a two page guide.  It's meant really to help us support the support staff at universities is not really necessarily meant for individual researchers.  It's to put stuff in the hands of research office or library or your research or whoever is assisting research staff at the different universities.  So we just said that a new resource have a shamelessly taking advantage of the opportunity to plug something new there.  And we will follow this up with more detailed resources and support and partnerships with each of the universities for the successful applicants or for the projects that even without funding are still going to go ahead in some modified form.  And that's where you get down to not just an outline of a plan, but really, OK, what is the plan and how do we do that more on the support for man's a little bit later.  Let's get down to the subject matter today.  So there are the changes that let's start with you.  So what's happening at the ANU in response to these particular changes?  I think it's important to recognize that the RC action is just part of a growing movement that's been happening globally.  So so the RC thankfully has taken a very sensible approach to this, which is to go with that tide of change and not to impose a mandatory set of requirements before we truly understand the implications.  All data management, data curation and data access.  As the RC have said, there's massive differences between disciplines.  One of the things we're doing at ANU and we were doing this prior to the RC changes is to have a series of workshops and to exchange best practice between different individuals within the institution.  It's important to recognize, I think that as far as the research community is concerned, you know, this may be new for.  Research offices, but it's not new for a lot of researchers.  A lot of researchers already commit to open access repository and astrophysics or astronomy in the digital humanities.  So there's a lot of effective stuff already happening for those researchers that are already active filling in the section and the RC is not an issue.  And the last thing you want is to impose some kind of institutional norm on it, which doesn't take account of these disciplinary differences.  But for those that maybe are kind of not being exposed to the issues around open data management and data curation, then it's a matter of just engaging in conversation with them and the ANS guide, you know, and all those kind of things just help to help people make more be more aware.  So I think it's, you know, it's a kind of work in progress, if you like, and we're just contributing to that by trying to open up the debate.  I am really keen to make sure this isn't seen in the research community as the research office seeking to command and control the research and how it develops.  But it is important that we provide effective support to researchers so that those that are struggling have access to either support from the research office, but probably more appropriate support from researchers in their own discipline that can actually provide them the guidance that's much more contextual than most research offices could ever recognize.  I mean, we're dealing with data sets that go from in terms of data commons at ANU, which is some of our kind of data archiving, you're going from things of kind of bilingual texts around Byzantine documents to weather data to space and astronomy data.  It is a huge panoply of research data, and they all have different requirements, and they also have different needs to share and to share when I think one of the big debates I'm kind of suppose having with myself in some senses is trying to figure out how you take account of when data should be shared,  as opposed to just the mantra that sharing data is good. I think most researchers would agree that science is meant to be an open enterprise and therefore sharing data is good.  But we do have to recognize that in the context of academic promotions, publications are still the primary mechanism.  And therefore, if you share your data before you've published, then actually other researchers can, without having sweated anything into the creation of the data set, they can gain the publication benefit from it.  And for that reason, data citation is also going to be increasingly important in the future in order to make sure that these things are good.  So Joe, what about the intersect? What's the mood there? What are the intersect staff doing in response to this?  So I guess I'd start by echoing what's already been seen before. It's very much a case that we're trying to support researchers in helping them secure and share their data.  A lot of researchers see great value in that, and those that don't, I guess, will either eventually see value or won't, but you can't make people do things.  If it's okay, I'll start by saying, hey, thanks very much for giving the opportunity to speak and briefly explain what intersect is for those who don't have that context.  So we're a not-proper company. We were founded in 2008 and we're now a consortium of 11 universities and four affiliate members.  And the company mission is to deliver research impact through e-research. So that's why the members pay their subscription fees.  We're big enough now to provide a whole bunch of services to our members to help them achieve that goal.  And I'm only going to talk about the ones that are relevant to assisting our members with responding to these data management changes in the funding rules.  But before I do that, I'd just like to make a couple of quick observations.  One is that we operate in a really interesting environment where we're trying to help 11 different universities respond to these changes.  And each of those universities is in a really different place internally.  Some of our member universities, when these changes came through, more or less said, yeah, no, we've got them under control.  We've got very well-advanced data management policies. We can help intersect. We don't need much help from you for these changes.  We just need you as an infrastructure partner. Others intersect heavily involved with the research office and library in IT.  The next observation I wanted to make is that responding to these changes, we're going to do very little to help researchers directly that we don't already do.  And most of our work happens in really close partnership with the research support structures inside the university.  And now I'm thinking mostly about the library and IT services and the research office.  But each of our members has at least one novel take on the best way to support research through technology.  The other observation I wanted to make was that research data requirements really sit on a spectrum from very simple to either not very much data  or a reasonable amount of data that's all quite homogeneous, right through to extremely complex data.  So either that it's very, very large or that it's wildly heterogeneous or that it needs to be near large computing facilities.  So the governing principle that we work with our members on is that the most valuable thing that we can do is to assist in situations where either the institution or the researcher  has a mismatch between what they can do for themselves and the complexity of the research data managing issues they face.  And that's the governing principle for all of the work that we do.  So there's a cohort of researchers who we help and they've been the ones who up to now have been the ones we've helped the most.  And they sit right at the complex end of the spectrum.  And so for those researchers, they will have, and this is already been said, they'll have very little adjustment to make to meet these new funding rules.  But for them, we act as a development partner.  So we build software systems for them.  We act as an infrastructure partner.  So we'll store their hundreds of terabytes of data.  All provide aspects of research advice for their grant proposals.  But it's very much working one-on-one with a research group.  And we have a lot of capability or at very least understand that they've got a really difficult problem solved and working with them individually.  And to put some figures against that, in the last quarter we've helped about 40 grant applications go through the pipeline through centers of research excellence,  data discovery, LEAP and various state proposals.  And that work will happen in close collaboration with the research officer and our members.  To give two concrete examples, one, the top one is the Strain Schizophrenia Research Bank.  Which is a software project that we've been working on over the last four or five years with the Australian Schizophrenia Research Institute.  And below is some work that we're currently doing with some big data, some big data work that's happening through the Lowe Institute in New South Wales.  So that's the context.  And so what are we doing now?  So what we're doing at the moment is trying to help members respond systematically to these ARC funding rule changes.  And at most institutions what we're doing is trying to provide that baseline support for all those researchers who operate at that simple end of the research data spectrum.  The ones who don't have a lot of data or that the data is relatively straightforward.  Because the data being simple doesn't mean that the data is not valuable.  The data is still very valuable.  And so a very large cohort of researchers, and we're doing two things to help institutions.  The first is that we need to help researchers understand when we meet researchers, we need to help them understand that there's a very basic layer of support that's offered by the institution.  And that layer of support actually provides the mechanisms of a basic research data management plan.  And then they can put an outline of that into their research data application.  We're making sure that researchers understand that they need to provide a safe home for their data and tend to it in an orderly manner.  We need them to understand that there are places that they can register their data and they should say that they will.  And that they can and they should make their data available to share, at least when they finish their project.  The back half of that is to provide the institution with a set of processes and infrastructure so that the researchers can make good on that commitment.  Because the researchers were encouraging them to make commitments to the ARC when they put in their grant application.  And so we're also working closely with the universities and also closely with the And on the Ground staff in New South Wales to help universities answer questions like, can our IET infrastructure actually support the simple research hosting task?  Or do we need an infrastructure partner?  And then working closely with the library and research office and IT services to work out who is going to provide the assistance for the researcher to make good on these commitments that they're making.  And finally and possibly most importantly, how do our researchers self assess whether they have a simple or complex data requirement?  And I'm really delighted to see the And's guidelines come out today so we'll be making full use of those.  I'd like to spend one more minute to talk about what's happening in the future.  And this is some activity that we've just got underway and it's again in close collaboration with And.  Is that data research endeavors involved in the complexity of the data management challenges that people face get larger.  And so we need a program of work to help researchers who are facing increased complexity move along this spectrum to become data aware researchers.  They're putting into place a bunch of training material that helps researchers with moderate data problems put together their own research data management plans.  So we've got a really well established learning and development program.  Last year we trained about 500 researchers in all sorts of research techniques and we'll be rolling that out over the next short time with our members.  Two things I'd like to say and this in some sense is a bit of a call to arms.  So all of the intersex training material is made available under creative comments licensing.  And secondly for our friends interstate, we're really happy, in fact really keen to work together to put together materials, make it of a high quality so that this is an area where we can get significant economies out of sharing.  It's a great idea, Joe, and we're very happy to help to see that sort of cross pollination across the second.  And so that's a more summary, which I think I've had just about enough time.  I would like to show one more slide, which I think is my favorite slide at the moment.  And this one, this is a graph of retractions.  So the black line is how many papers get published and the blue and the red lines are how many papers get retracted.  They're on different scales, so don't worry that they intersect.  But somewhere around 1995 something happened and the number of retractions has skyrocketed since.  And I like to think that part of what's happened is that there's a lot more collaborating around data and there's a lot more people checking other people's work.  And this is a symptom in the large of science working properly.  And I think that as data is shared more widely, this trend will increase.  And this is part of the part of the reason I think by the I.C. is absolutely right to be strongly encouraging the positive of data.  And our challenge, I think, is to make it as easy as possible for researchers to do that, but also to help them see value in doing it as well.  And that's that's more or less what our program of work is meant to achieve.  Thanks, Joe. It's an important point that's a good slide that the a lot of this is not necessarily only about reuse of data,  but it's about the integrity of science and the openness with a scientific method in that sense, you know, from across all disciplines and being able to show that the conclusions you came to were based on on something and be able to share that.  I mean, there's a there's an excellent report called Science as an Open Enterprise produced by the Royal Society in London.  And it seemed it's kind of follows the trajectory of this slide from Joe, that we had to remind ourselves that science was meant to be an open enterprise.  And with the pressure to kind of compete almost at one stage, probably a few years ago getting rather too intense, we're now in a phase of much stronger collaboration,  which I think is just, you know, we have to remember the fundamentals of good science is your data should be reproducible, and it should be open to challenge.  And therefore, all of the all of these moves are just reminding us of what founded science many centuries ago, and the principles that founded science was sharing your work and having critique of your work.  And in order to critique your work, it's not critiquing the publication is critiquing the whole package.  I think I think this is this is you know, this is why it's a it's a kind of seems to be a no brainer that people should support these moves.  We do have to make sure that we do them sensitively and appropriately.  Is a very great generalization how or how the applicants reacting to the new one.  I think as you'd expect range of human beings with a range of traits from respect to kind of reflects their data savviness to some extent.  Some is no problem whatsoever.  To others they're kind of saying well, I've always done this and my publications have always been well regarded. Why do we have to do this.  To some extent they're not wrong, because some of the publications are sufficiently clear that you don't actually need access to primary data.  And it's more for reuse that you access to primary data rather than for validation.  I am concerned that there's increasing number of publications, particularly the life sciences from what one reads in nature and elsewhere, that they the date the publication is not sufficiently complete to know that it's reproducible.  And a couple of recent nature papers, the one nature paper, they could only reproduce 11% of advanced cancer studies in another study by I think it was AstraZeneca the pharmaceutical company, they could only replicate from publications eight out of 56 in fantasies and biosciences.  And that to some extent is kind of this kind of competitive edge where people maybe don't want to disclose absolutely everything until they've kind of milked it to get maximum profile.  Thankfully, that's a rare phenomenon, I think. But nonetheless, it's a phenomenon we have to be aware of. And we have to make sure that science is as beyond reproach as possible.  And in this system that's, you know, that we're talking about here that application data management, the lucky, the good thing, the good design in this is that it is very sensitive to the different discipline requirements and it's the peers from a particular panel that are applying the norms of that particular area.  You know, I always get concerned when it says a consequence of a new funding rule or a new regulation that we assume this is the first time the sector has paid attention to something, which is not the case.  There are many, many researchers have already got their very data savvy. And therefore we shouldn't think that just because the ARC has introduced a funding rule that this is novel, this is new.  What is new is the requirement to answer a question in the application, which is healthy.  And Joe, what's, do you have a feeling for the temperature of things with applicants? What's the feedback?  Absolutely. I think there's probably three cohorts that are kind of a bit different. So there's one set who will happily comply. They don't necessarily see a huge amount of value in it for them, but, you know, they're happy to do it.  For them, it's about, I'm already pretty busy. Can you give me as much help as you can both in terms of writing a grant and then complying later on? I think there's a range of cohorts that you just have no interest.  But there's some, I think right at the other end of the spectrum who see this as a strategic area, and again, this is not new for them, a strategic area where they can compete internationally.  So being known as a source of data or a discipline is something that people are interested in and something that RDSI is really right in their initial rhetoric about saying, this is the place where you put collections that are significant.  And no, that's not the word in the news anymore. But some researchers really latched onto that and said, well, I can actually use the fact that this is in Australia's national repository of significant research data as a lever in my negotiations with potential collaborators.  Some people are really engaged with it, not just as a greater good idea, but also as an idea of strategic importance for their research. So you really do cover the full gamut.  The place where we get the strongest reaction is where there's a mismatch between how valuable I say it for themselves and how much effort they've got to expend.  I think one of the other interesting phenomenons that we're recognizing is kind of engagement with participants in research.  The data part of this is kind of what's produced. But we're seeing an increasing number of studies that are consulting about the research they intend to undertake on the participants that they may actually be studying as part of the project.  And that brings in this issue of public sharing of data. So there's making data publicly available, but it's also making it accessible to those that are non specialist.  So that's a key issue. How much stuff do you have to put around the data to make it truly available to the public as opposed to publicly available, which are two very different things.  Yeah, that's right.  I think we're really at very early days and trying to understand that except in a few disciplines, which I've already, and that's a key example is an excellent version of working probably with a community of researchers, but also with a community of other professionals.  What about your own staff, the research office and support staff? How did they feel about this?  I think the challenge for research offices is that, you know, as kind of pressures on budgets fight, but demands for more support increases.  It does mean that research offices can be under considerable pressure.  I think the important thing for from a research office perspective is to recognize that this isn't their problem. It's a research community issue.  And certainly at ANU, we collaborate extensively with the library and that collaboration is very, very healthy.  They've been working in data and archiving data far more than research offices have. And therefore it's important, but the research office is not seen as the single point of knowledge.  But in terms of the staff, I think what we need to do is we need to increase the training and the visibility for those staff.  And I'm pretty sure this will probably be on the arms conference agenda when the conference is in Canberra in September. But we do need to make research offices more aware.  But they've got lots of other things that are having to be more and more aware of these days as the world gets increasingly complex.  So it's a pretty high pressure place to be. And you can come across some researchers that are quite emotional in this space, both in favor and against.  And that can put pressure on trying to introduce them to the needs of the ARC, but also get them to try and take account of the changes that are happening in the global research community.  And certainly we wish ANU to be and to continue to be at the cutting edge of that community and not to be one of a leading pack as opposed to a fallen pack.  Joe, is that different for any research support provider? Is there a different kind of challenge for the staff there?  I think it is because we're one more step removed. The key challenge for us is understanding what the institution's response is and helping in the most appropriate way.  There's always tempting to try to find a one size fits all solution. And that just doesn't work. So we're in constant dialogue with our member unions, especially the research office at the moment, trying to work out the place where we fit in.  In some sense, it's the unenviable task of trying to make ourselves obsolete every time we go and help someone by raising the internal capabilities of groups that do this sort of stuff.  And the issue for many research offices is they become trapped into a world of being compliance monitors, which is not an appropriate way to structure.  Compliance is a necessary evil. You do have to have compliance. You do have to fit all the rules that exist.  And you get concerned that sometimes there are rather too many rules and we're making the world a bit too complicated.  But we have to play the game by the rules that are set. But it is about recognizing the research office as part of a support infrastructure.  One aspect of which is compliance. But the danger with compliance is you lead to a kind of lowest threshold of performance.  So do you comply? Yes. That means it's ticked so you don't do anymore.  But in the world of research data, there are much bigger issues than mere compliance. The ARC is following the global trend.  And for Australia, we need to make sure that Australia is really committing to open access and open data as part of science as an open enterprise.  And research offices are only a small part of that equation. They're not the single point of all solutions.  So just before we go off to the questions from the audience, just one other reflection. We've been focusing a little bit on the research management.  So the management of data section, the new requirement to have an outline of a plan and the repercussions of that.  There are some more fundamental changes that Greg referred to at the beginning around just an overall reminder from the ARC that you have responsibilities according to the code.  And that you are strongly encouraged, wherever appropriate to deposit in a publicly accessible repository.  How do you see those longer term changes affecting the role of research office tug-of-war?  Is that you will be required if research data is one of the reportable outputs?  What repercussions does that have for a research office where data could be anywhere in the world in one sense, not just neatly stored in journal publication?  Honest answers I don't really know. I do get concerned when I hear about pressure on institutional repositories because my view is it doesn't matter where stuff is as long as it's in a good place with good infrastructure and it's accessible.  So I'm glad to see the ARC have the requirement to be either in an institutional repository or in a disciplined or other publicly accessible repository.  Because there's a lot of really excellent stuff happening within disciplines and we need to make sure that this isn't about institutional control,  or the single repository thinking of it as something physical.  I am concerned about the potential build up through time, not so much on pressure on the research office but pressure on supporting the research infrastructure.  And therefore we need to be quite agile in our solutions making best use of repositories that exist elsewhere and having good metadata accessible through an institutional source,  but not necessarily actually thinking that everything has to be brigade into a single piece of institutional infrastructure.  As I understand it, in many branches of physics there are major data archives that already existed for years and they don't exist necessarily with Australia, they can be on the east and the east coast of the USA.  And it's really important that we make best use of the global infrastructure and we don't create a non-necessary infrastructure burden on Australian institutions without making full use of that which is available internationally.  The pressure on research budgets is intense. The cost of research will continue to rise ahead of the normal rate of inflation and the cost of providing infrastructure will continue to rise.  And it's not so much that the costs in this space need necessarily be large, but it's when you add them to all the other costs that with an efficiency gain in the sector, there are real pressure points in funding.  We all have to be aware of including the AARC.  And Joe, from an research provider point of view, what's the longer term shift there to depositing data after a project? How do you see that playing out from an intersect point of view?  I don't think I can add to what's already been said. I think that's bang on the money. I think the most value for research data is where researchers can find it.  And fragmenting stuff across institutional repositories I think can make sense in some certain cases, but fundamentally researchers are driven by community and collaboration.  And I think the natural order of things will be for the specific repositories that people understand how to get to.  The other aspect of our thinking data citation, I'm not sure how much research data will actually get searched for that's not cited.  I think the fundamental cognitive mindset of how researchers find interesting other research through the literature.  And I think that's a really important part of whatever happens. But really I'm just finessing the edges of what's already been said.  Thanks Joe. Before we go off to the questions, Justin, was there anything that came in that conversation there that you'd like to comment on or clarify or anything, any thoughts that that provoked?  I'd just like to say it's very encouraging to see the level of acceptance and interest across the sector. It's fantastic to see, I guess, the preparedness or hear of the preparedness generally speaking out there.  And the discussion at the moment is reflective of the fact that there is a flexibility and approach across disciplines in which data is managed and considered.  And that's why we haven't made it a mandate. Basically, we'll leave that up to the experts in the disciplines out there to decide best practice and how to store, disseminate and make accessible the data that's generated from their research project.  So all in all, I think it's moving very well in the right direction.  Thanks Justin. All right. So we did have a couple of questions here.  The question is, is the IRC going to fund existing repositories or the building of new repositories to cater for the increased demand generated by this policy change?  Perhaps that's a question for Justin.  There's no intention at the moment to provide additional funds under any of our projects for the development of specific infrastructure. That being said, if there is a advantageous reason to seek funding for that basis, we would, I guess, consider it as part as a normal leaf round.  Yeah, and certainly the larger infrastructure question requires some kind of coordination. If there are these, if this is the growing expectation, and we talked about that last time we were here that, you know, this is a social trend that's just watching over all of research.  If that is the trend, then obviously not all of that can be taken, not all the infrastructure requirements in there can be taken up by the IRC. Now, there's probably some opportunities within the IRC, but obviously it needs to be taken into account for the whole sort of planning of research infrastructure.  I know that IRC is one part of the infrastructure funding, but you know, there are important parts, you know, for example, of Encriss, that some of this infrastructure needs to be at least brought to bear on this problem. And I think it comes back to your point before, Doug, was about finding the infrastructure that's appropriate and that's easy and that's natural for researchers to use and using that in the most efficient way.  And my understanding is that if you have substantial costs that fall within the project that are required and can be justified in line with normally IRC requirements, you can build those costs into the proposal.  But of course, in the vast majority of projects, the substantial costs fall outside the project period. And, you know, I do think, for the good of Australia, we need a really sensible debate about research infrastructure, which this is the part.  And the other point that I would make is I think the, you know, there's a real huge increase in the volume of search data. In the number of research meetings I've been in recently and a whole variety of disciplines, I kind of almost hate the words, but big data comes up every time, the challenges of big data.  How are we going to integrate different data sets in order to have more probing research questions? And I think we're really just at the start of the discussion around data and data infrastructure.  But it's important for Australia that we can hold our head up in world science, and I use science in the German sense of the word meaning all disciplines, that we can hold our head up international.  And I am concerned about the research infrastructure questions.  And the other coordinating point I think that's over the last year or so the chief scientist has been interested in that coordination of the requirements of science and infrastructure and there are quite a few reports out there in the National Research Investment Plan.  So there were mentions there of what infrastructure is required for these kind of open data policies.  I've also mentioned open source and I think it's fundamental that as much of these developments in different institutions within Australia is open source in order that we can all stand on each other's shoulders and therefore stand out internationally as best in class,  rather than seeing it as a game to be one up on somebody in this particular area of infrastructure. I think it's much more important to act as a collective than it is to act as an individual institution.  All right, there's another question here, not so much a question, but a comment on timeframes.  Our research officer runs internal EOI processes for pre filtering ARC applications. I've been interested in knowing how common this is at other places.  So what this has meant in practice is that our internal deadlines of these have now already passed for discovery and are coming up soon tomorrow for discovery early career research awards and Decro.  Information provided by our CEG, the FAQs and by ANS, including these webinars, unfortunately came a bit late for us to provide effective support in this time round.  But we have done our best. Is it the intention to provide this kind of information a bit earlier next year?  So look from our point of view, this is now a part of the furniture and we're providing this kind of support from now on. This is just a line in the sand and these funding schemes can come due at different times of the year and we should be ready now, I think, from now on to provide that support when it's actually required.  Everything is cumulative. You have to start at some point and the good news is we've started. And I think from an ARC perspective, it's not so much this set of deadlines, which will really say how much has been kind of advanced.  It's how that changes over the next two, three, four years and how the data management section becomes more refined and more and more elegant as more sharing of the benefits done. I would counsel just to ask the ARC to make sure that they are open and sharing in the views of the  assessors when they are even though it's not a formal part of the assessment, I would want them to make some general observations from different funding rounds on what the assessors found with regard to data management plans, where there are any developments that looked really exciting and interesting that people should be aware of.  Because the ARC is in a very privileged position in receiving the best researchers across Australia submitting proposals to them and therefore they have an integrating role to make best use of the knowledge in front of them.  And that's just not a proposals that are funded, but maybe proposals that have exceptionally good sections in data management and seeking ways to share those. So again, it commits to this open source environment where we're sharing best practice.  Yes, we're establishing in one sense the kind of precedence and standards will be developed through those decisions there.  It's not about the individual project and individual proposal, it's about the research system as a whole.  We're committed to the open data and we will be actually looking and monitoring its effect on applications even when they do come in. And if we do need to provide further advice and examples, we will definitely be looking at the opportunity to do that.  Yeah, and I think one of your mechanisms is through the ARC Open Day. And can't remember there being a substantive section on open data and open access. And I think it would merit animation through that set of mechanisms as well as others.  Yeah, we're continually trying to liaise with the sector as much as possible on these new initiatives. We actually have disclosed the survey with the call, the Council of Australian University Librarians,  primarily on open access, but there was a couple of questions in that survey regarding the data preparedness and archiving and the like. So there will be some information that's useful that comes out of that as well.  Yeah, and the ARC's approach is welcomed I think, certainly by me in terms of the way you're approaching this generally.  Okay, last question here. Question for Jo Thurman. What do you think happened in 2008, 2010, which resulted in far fewer papers being retracted? So I think that was the...  Oh yeah, that's a great question. So there was a rise from 1996, but then a fall from 2010?  The average period between a paper being published and retracted is four and a half years. So that fall is just we haven't found them yet.  What a shame.  But that's a terrific question. Good. I'm going to say we, it's not actually my job to find them.  That's right. You're job to show the slides. Anything else? All that? Any other comments there? Good. So I just remind you of the ANTH support around this.  We have basically a set of resources and you'll see those on the screen now for the data management and funder requirements.  The guide that we talked about earlier is on the second URL that's on the screen now, the data management slash funding.  And you'll find our particular guide there because it's particularly to do with one of the funder's requirements.  We're running again these kind of events and webinars and I'm very happy to hear your ideas if you want to have a discussion about X, please contact us.  Or if you think it would be great to hear from Y, please tell us. We're very keen that the subject matter of these webinars should be really decided on by the community.  And then the third leg of support is the consultancies, both on these short term requirements during the funding submission season and longer term, you know, how can a university really undertake its responsibilities under the code of responsible conductive research.  And quite happy to have these long term partnerships with universities to really bed down all different policy and practice and culture change and infrastructure that might be required around the longer term change here.  You know, and with in mind to be able to build up the profile and collaboration and return on investment that comes with research data.  I think that's all. So we do have a couple of upcoming webinars we've got. You can see the one screen there you go to the site there you'll find out what's coming up soon.  There's a webinar coming up towards the end of this month with Max Wilson from University College London.  And that's broadly around institutional support for data management.  So that sounds like a really interesting one that's coming up fairly soon.  Thank you very much, Douglas. It's been really great to have you here and get that sort of inside of you.  If people wanted to contact you further about the kinds of things there, how would they through that?  That was dot romerton at ANU dot EDU dot EU happy to receive any emails positive or negative.  Good.  That's good.  And Joe, thank you very much. It's because of very refreshing sort of insight into how a state based research support provider is active in this area.  So thank you very much for that. If people have questions or want to take up offers of intersex services, how would they contact you, Joe?  They can have a contact me at Joe dot furbon at intersex.org.au or if they're in the world, just make contact with their local research analyst.  Okay.  And Justin, thank you very much again for sitting in and terrifying and use those points there from the ACARC's perspective to get the ACARC perspective.  Justin, what's the is there a particular website or somewhere you guide people towards?  Basically go to the frequently asked questions on our discovery projects at this stage will provide some information on our expectations.  If there's any specific questions, you can always email info at ACARC dot com dot au.  Excellent.  But I'd just like to say how how encouraging it is to see the interest and the positive interest in the sector with the introduction of this requirement.  Yes, it is very good.  You know, we can see the number of people that are, you know, contacting and and these webinars, etc. So it's certainly of interest and not a kind of negative interest.  It's an interesting or here's a good challenge and how do we how do we address these this new challenge and opportunity.  Thank you very much.  Thank you, Greg.  Thank you for your time.  Excellent background and some great insights.  And thanks to the audience terrific inputs.  And we'll see you at our next virtual event.  Thanks for that.  Bye bye.
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