From the Alliance Newsletter – July 2025:
Presentation materials from RDM Jumpstart are now available online. This week-long workshop in May addressed the importance and main principles of research data management (RDM), while exploring the increase in RDM requirements by funders and publishers.
Presentation files are linked from each calendar event.
UBC Data Bites workshops are now available for sign up for the summer term, and open to the public. These workshops support skill building in a wide range of research data management topics and task.
Session topics and registration:
Recordings from WestDRI's seminar series are made available through their YouTube channel.
WestDRI is part of the Research Computing Group at SFU (https://www.rcg.sfu.ca), offers a range of tutorials and online workshops targeted at helping researchers learn about and use SFU and Digital Research Alliance of Canada (https://alliancecan.ca) computing resources, as well as advanced skills in computational research.
Sessions range in length from 30 minutes to two hours and are delivered online via Zoom. For more information, visit https://training.westdri.ca or email training@westdri.ca.
From the Digital Research Alliance of Canada:
This week-long workshop will introduce attendees to best practices in Research Data Management (RDM) using common tools to support research transparency and reproducibility. Robust implementation of RDM principles enables researchers to address bias and reproducibility, effectively share their research, and ensure long term access to their research inputs and outputs. From research question development to findings dissemination, RDM underpins a fruitful and successful academic career.
What will we cover?
Sessions will address the importance and underlying principles of RDM; we’ll explore issues related to RDM and the growing landscape of RDM-related requirements stemming from funders and publishers. Using the R programming language, the Open Science Framework (OSF), and Borealis (Dataverse), we’ll explore solutions to address these issues and enable compliance with funder and publisher requirements.
All attendees will work with a common dataset to explore how to ask questions of data using common computational tools. Throughout, attendees will be introduced to: the documentation and metadata requirements to ensure accessibility: considerations to address different aspects of reproducibility; practices to maintain their data’s integrity; and ways to ensure their final data deposit is adherent to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles.
Completion of the Jumpstart can be applied to the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities, and will meet the requirement for the minimum 20 hours of in-depth workshops.
On Feb. 6 this announcement from Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab:
Today we released our archive of data.gov on Source Cooperative. The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov. It will be updated daily as new datasets are added to data.gov.
This is the first release in our new data vault project to preserve and authenticate vital public datasets for academic research, policymaking, and public use.
Link to the announcement:
https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/02/06/announcing-data-gov-archive/
Link to the archive:
https://source.coop/repositories/harvard-lil/gov-data/description
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada and the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) curation team are excited to invite you to join us for presentation, "Sharing and depositing research data: a guide for researchers" The webinar will take place on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, from 1:00pm to 2:00pm ET.
Please register in advance using this link: https://engagedri-ca.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_csWmPqoWR_eNMg5Ph-k73AIn celebration of Love Data Week (February 10-14), the Digital Research Alliance of Canada is celebrating data and raising global awareness of the importance of managing and sharing research data. As part of the global agenda, the FRDR curation team will present a webinar on effective methods for structuring and preparing research data for sharing in general data repositories such as the FRDR. These good scientific practices are essential to make research data a self-sustaining resource that can be understood and reused by the scientific community and the public for academic or research purposes.Presented by: Daniel Manrique-Castano, Curation Officer, Digital Research Alliance of Canada
With thanks to colleague Melissa Cuthill at KPU Library for sharing this information and to Eugene Barsky and colleagues at UBC Library for this generous offering:
the workshop creator, Eugene Barsky, has thrown the UBC-run workshops open to anyone to attend. I popped in on the one today on File Naming, and confirmed with Eugene that we at other institutions are indeed welcome to direct our researchers to take the UBC workshops …
The number of registrants is capped at around 25, but many of the more fundamental workshop topics are offered several times throughout the academic year, some as often as once a month:
