Interview: A vision for Open Science and Data Stewardship at ETH Zurich

Elizabeth, what is your main area of research?

My research is concerned with the health implications of inequality and the complex social and political barriers to achieving basic service provision. For example, why are there still half a billion people practicing open defecation when building toilets and treating sewage is not only relatively easy, but extremely effective at preventing disease? I¡¯m fascinated by problems that appear simple on the surface, but are so tricky to address because they are deeply embedded in social norms and political structures.

Elizabeth, how is your group currently composed? Who are the members of your research group?

We¡¯re a small, but growing team of very diverse researchers: Senior Scientist Marc Kalina is a human geographer whose work is focused on urbanization in African cities; Post-doc Jurgita Slekiene is a psychologist who studies behaviour change with a focus on the mediating role of mental health; Doctoral student Saloni Vijay has a background in environmental engineering and is interested in the health impacts of trash burning; Lin Boynton is a biogeochemist who is investigating plastic recycling; and of course Lars Sch?bitz, our Open Science specialist.

Employing an Open Science specialist is by no means the norm in ETH research groups. What prompted you, Elizabeth, to employ an Open Science specialist in your research group, independent of the current funding programmes on Open Research Data?

I joined ETH after spending 5 years working as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Malawi where I taught and supervised a lot of students without teaching assistants or administrative assistants. I managed to keep myself and my team organized, but I always felt like there had to be a better way to do things. When you work somewhere with daily blackouts, you learn to mistrust technology: I would save documents in multiple locations, make printed copies of almost everything, and kept several parallel back up systems. It worked, but it was a mess. When I returned to Switzerland I knew that I had the opportunity to start fresh with clear workflows and efficient tools, but really didn¡¯t know how to begin. Luckily, I found that Lars knew exactly what my group needed; because he had worked extensively across the African continent, he knew where I was coming from literally, and organizationally.

Your field of research focuses on over-exploited countries. What is the take on Open Science in your partner institutions, Elizabeth?

Let me say first what the impact of Closed Science was on my students and colleagues. First, accessing scientific literature was always difficult: the ETH Library access is so seamless here, it may not be obvious to users how many paid subscription services we have access to. Second, we spent a lot of time accessing even the most simple information: Data sets had to be emailed from government offices or PDFs had to be photocopied from reports sitting on shelves. Third, we saw so much repetition and wasted funds: it felt like researchers (both local and international) were always collecting the same types of data, but then would either publish it in a thesis on paper (local), or fly away with the data, forcing someone else to come and repeat the same exercise.

Elizabeth, how does applying Open Science principles have an impact on the work your collaborators do?

Thinking about how Open Science could change academia and research in Malawi, and countries like it, makes me so excited! Having access to openly available data would not only save time and money, but will highlight the amazing work that has gone unrecognized for so long just because it wasn¡¯t published in an academic journal.

Lars, as an Open Science specialist in the research group for Global Health Engineering, what are your main responsibilities and what is a typical day like for you in the research group?

Lars, how did you settle on this career path? What sparked your interest in Open Science?

It settled on me. I have always had an affinity for computers, and had professors that naturally taught me how to manage data properly without calling it research data management. I knew how to work with spreadsheets, but in my first job realised the limitations of using spreadsheet-based software tools for my data analysis. When the R programming language was introduced to me, I was hooked by the kind community, and the concept of computational reproducibility. That was the spark; if others could verify my results, and build upon them if I published the raw data and code that produced those results, then why should I not do that!? Surprisingly (to me), not everyone thought the same way at that point, so it took me another five years to get the opportunity to try it out in Liz¡¯s group.

Lars, what does it take to fulfil these tasks and what have you learned?

You¡¯ve got to be persistent. I only know a few researchers with healthy work hours, and asking them to do something that doesn¡¯t count towards their tenure package is obviously met with resistance. It helps to be empathetic. I try to meet people where they are and take it from there. Everything I have learned about effective teaching comes from Greg Wilson and his fabulous book ¡°external page open educational material for data science.

Julian, the ETH Library is coordinating a pilot programme for establishing data stewardship at ETH Zurich. Funding from swissuniversities is used to finance a small share of the work of six data stewards*. What are your goals, and how are they linked to this role of the Open Science specialist?

As part of the national ORD strategy, swissuniversities encourages universities to promote and incentivise data stewardship and ORD specialists. To promote such roles, we need role models. During our discussion about data stewardship at ETH Zurich we quickly realised that these role models already exist: Many research groups at ETH already include employees who take care of adequate research data management, reproducible data analysis or the development of code scripts. The project now allows us to support such roles and to highlight to other research groups the important work these specialists and supporters do. We see that data stewardship can and does in fact take many forms at ETH Zurich. Having an Open Science specialist employed as an integral part of a research group is one of these options and it aligns neatly with the requirements of many funders and ETH guidelines for the open availability of research data.

Beyond the promotion of role models, the project seeks to establish the Data Stewardship Network (DSN) at ETH Zurich, to align ORD practices with policies at ETH Zurich, and to further build up know-how and training on RDM- and ORD-related topics.

The new Guidelines for Research Data Management at ETH Zurich specifically require researchers to publish research data and programming code underlying a publication at the same time as the associated results by default. Julian, what makes it difficult for researchers at ETH to do this in practice?

It is the diversity of research groups, community standards in various disciplines, and the various types of research data that hamper uniform solutions. While in some projects it is fairly easy to provide data and code publicly without restrictions, in other projects, legal or ethical restrictions might not allow to publish the confidential data underlying a publication, but it could still be possible to provide publicly available metadata for these research data. To provide another example, in some disciplines the norm is to publish replication code for simulation models instead of all the terabytes of data generated from these models. As a logical consequence, the RDM Guidelines at ETH Zurich acknowledge this diversity by referring to ¡°community standards¡± in form of best practices within a scientific community. This diversity will also be reflected in the varying roles of data stewards within their respective team settings.

Elizabeth, what convinced you to let Lars devote some of his time to endeavours that go beyond the work of your research group?

I don¡¯t pay Lars: the Swiss tax-payers do. I think it¡¯s important that they - and all taxpayers - get to see what the institutions they support produce. Whether that¡¯s ETH or a water company in Malawi, data should be accessible to everyone. We¡¯re trying to change the culture around data and the current initiatives are an opportunity to do that on a massive scale.

Elizabeth, what are the advantages of having an Open Science specialist employed in your research group?
Having someone like Lars in our group means that our affiliated graduate students, and the students that take our classes get exposed to a way of thinking that they might not get anywhere else. We think of each of our students as an ambassador for change: whether they¡¯re working in a group project in a course or with a university in Ghana, they have the potential to influence others to adopt similar principles.

Elizabeth, does that mean you would like to see more Open Science specialists and data stewards* employed at ETH Zurich?

To all three of you (Elizabeth, Julian and Lars): What are the main developments you expect to see in the next few years in terms of Open Science?

Julian: I believe in the future we will see more and more datasets, code scripts or other types of open output become citable and recognised research output in their own right. At the same time, the topic of Open Science will certainly be ever-present in the upcoming years or even decades.

Elizabeth: I expect that academic publishing will start putting an increased emphasis on data publication; currently, it¡¯s mostly optional and usually implemented poorly. Sensing this trend, I imagine that big publishers will start to draft guidelines to assist with and enforce the publications of data sets. What I really hope though is that research products beyond publications are given the same attention that manuscripts are, and that we can move beyond the single-currency of publications.

Lars: We will see a shift in the appreciation of the Research Software Engineer. Programs specifically for this role will evolve. But only once universities start providing real opportunities for a career path in research software engineering will we see wider adoption of Open Science principles.

To all three of you (Elizabeth, Julian and Lars): What do you think the limits are when it comes to openness in research?

Julian: The combination of new opportunities for linked open data and articifical intelligence, and authoritarian tendencies in geopolitics will most likely also lead to a questioning of the global, open availability of certain types of research data. Any major societal development ¨C and openness in research is one of those ¨C has unintended consequences and we will certainly have to face and discuss some of those in the future.

Elizabeth: The biggest limit is the necessary mindset change: moving from a ¡°this is mine¡± to a ¡°this was created by me, for use by everyone¡± mindset. Other than that, electricity and the internet are still barriers to many around the world, but I have hope that our friends in Electrical Engineering are working on that.

Lars: Our own imagination, and hopefully, that is limitless. I believe ¡°open¡±, whether research, government, or industry, plays a significant role in tackling some of the bigger problems of our time.