TorresEspin-2021

Promoting FAIR Data Through Community-driven Agile Design: the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury (odc-sci.org)

  • File: data/review/fulltext/oa-id-W3188722327.pdf
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-021-09533-8
  • OpenAlex ID: https://openalex.org/W3188722327

Characteristics of the paper

  • Type of paper (e.g., tips, example):
    • example
    • workflow
  • Themes (e.g., tools, organization):
    • tools
    • organization
  • Other keywords (e.g., newcomers):
    • Data infrastructure
    • FAIR data
    • Case study
    • Agile design
    • Templates
    • Examples
    • Strategies
    • Software development

Tools

Specific tools mentioned; their function; where in the research process used

  • GitHub?; Seems to use GitHub to at least build the website; dissemination?
  • Agile development; iteratively develop project and help with project management; workflow, planning, development
  • Staged development; distinct stages mixed with iterations; planning, development

Organizational structure for open collaboration

Governance

  • Building and encouraging community approval, support, and ownership via workshop events done in collaboration with major organizations/conferences.
    • Engaging multiple levels of stakeholders
    • Collaborate with funding agencies early on
  • Split into different teams, which have positions that aim to be about 3 year to rotate around people:
    • Leadership board to coordinate the development and operation
    • Executive board for oversight and be involved in executive decisions
    • Community board to engage in community, get feedback from workshops
    • Data science team for data curation, quality control, and revision

Workflow

  • Took a multi-staged approach to establishing the group/community.

  • At each stage, it was slowly about introducing the concepts to a broader and broader audience and getting feedback all along the way.

  • Development follows principles of agile software development by getting requirements from users, designing and developing those requirements, seeking feedback from users on what was developed, and testing the developed features.

  • Use of the iterative development helped them identify and respond to issues that came up. This is something that could be something that non-software projects could use to help with collaboration and maintaining momentum and motivation.

Educational perspectives

Educational needs

  • No education or training was mentioned in this paper.

Barriers

Barriers for open science

  • Building up an open collaboration project takes years of continued work and effort.

  • While the project’s output is a data sharing platform, the process to get there required a high level of collaboration.

  • Required a lot of expertise not typically found in researchers (e.g. software development, UI/UX design, data engineering, writing user-friendly documentation/tutorials).

  • Required getting regular direct feedback from potential users of project, which wasn’t always easy.