Little-known resources, public access policy and data management: Eight questions with VCU Librarian Nina Exner
Nina Exner, Ph.D., calls her job a ‘funny profession.’
Being a research data librarian means different things at different institutions, but for Exner it translates largely into data management. She helps VCU researchers comply – appropriately and ethically – with the data management plans required by the government or foundations who give them grants.
The Wright Center sat down with Exner to learn more about what that means, why public access policy matters and what researchers should know about VCU Libraries’ resources.
What’s the most common reason that faculty and researchers come to you?
For faculty, they’ve often been told that someone in the library can help their lab share data better. They have a graduate assistant, a postdoc and four graduate assistants, and suddenly they can’t find any of their files. Or they lost a whole manuscript because they discovered that the analysis wasn’t coming out right. They’ve had something bad happen, and they’re trying to prevent it the next time.
There are two main reasons for young researchers and graduate students: One is that they’re trying to find data that other people have shared, so they can do a secondary analysis. The other is that graduate students don’t necessarily understand how to translate their research question concepts into the data definitions that they’ve got. We call that operationalization, but that’s just research methods jargon for taking a concept like depression or happiness or well-being – and translating it into specific survey questions that they might’ve gotten from the Census, or that might have been taken from health records.
The other thing that I’ll get from faculty is the need for help with a data management plan or a data sharing statement.
Why do researchers need help with data management?
Data is fragile and pretty easy to mess up. You can imagine a spreadsheet full of numbers that you saved two years ago. Or for me, it’s sometimes two months ago. And you open it up and one of the columns is labeled ‘variable three’ or ‘protein one.’ And you’re like, ‘What did I mean by that?’ So you’ve technically got the data, but it’s no good to you because you don’t know what you did.
So one element of data management is the description part. And knowing what you need for the data to be usable. Other elements are the more technical and methodological stuff. But the goal is getting the data to be shareable, even if you’re only sharing it back to yourself.
Is it true that data sharing rules are changing?
Yes! The NIH in 2023 is going to require new data sharing rules. If research is NIH funded, starting in 2023, all research data coming from NIH proposals, regardless of mechanism or the amount of the funding, will have to have a data sharing plan. And the new data sharing plans will look a lot different than the current sharing plans. Instead of a one-section sharing plan that we have now, it’s a six-section sharing plan. It will be much more detailed.
It’s going to be big. Right now, data sharing plans only affect people with R-series grants and centers. And the grant has to have more than $500,000 in direct costs. After 2023, if you get a $10,000 pilot grant and it’s going to produce research data, you have to share the data.
How does your work intersect with publication submission, public access and NIH policy?
It’s integral to it. Public access is about getting information to researchers and fostering better science, because science is cumulative. Dr. Hernandez finds something important and publishes it. Then Dr. Kim reads that publication and has a great idea, and they make a study that builds on Hernandez’s study. And then Smith and Jones make a study building on Kim’s study. And so on. But if no one ever sees the studies, then science doesn’t get built on.
The money for research funded by the NIH and other federal agencies comes from the taxpayers. Starting in the early 2000s, people began to push for better access to those published studies. The two big groups that lobbied for it to happen were patient health advocates and researchers.
Articles are very expensive. The average doctor doesn’t have university-level subscriptions to get these articles. If you want to buy them one off, they’re $40-50 a pop. So if you want to read the top 20 articles on a certain rare cancer that one of your patients has, you would be spending hundreds of dollars.
It’s an equity issue, too. If you’re at a big research university like VCU, you probably have access to lots of articles, but if you’re at Virginia Union University, the biology faculty there would still like to have access to health research publications.
Why should researchers care about ensuring their publications are properly submitted?
Well, you can see the impact of the public access law, because everyone who researches medicine uses PubMed, and they look for the articles with the button that indicates it’s a free article. The public access law is where those icons came from.
And the people whose work is publicly accessible, they get cited more. The rough competitive advantage estimates have been somewhere between 20 and 30% more citations. It’s an advantage to the field.
Basically, if you use PubMed and you get articles through PubMed, you’re benefiting from this policy. You probably should also be giving back to the policy. Public access is the structure feeding into it.
Is submitting your publication in compliance with federal law difficult?
There are a few different approaches, which can create a challenge. If you’re going with a well-established journal, they’re probably going to do it all for you. Then there’s declining levels of how much is done for you, all the way down to: You have to do it all yourself, then wait a few days, and then connect it in the backend to your grant.
The guidance isn’t always intuitive. There are two numbers that are very similar. One is called a PMID and one is a PMCID. And there’s no reason that anyone but librarians should know or care about this, but if you grab the wrong one, then the computer will barf on your attempt. Nine times out of 10 in professional life, it’s the PMID researchers would use. But the PMCID is the one you need to use for submission.
Once you overcome those challenges, it’s not terribly difficult.
Where can people go if they’re struggling?
We can train a research team or a lab on how to find the PMCID correctly, if that’s the type of journal that they’re mostly working in. And if they’re delegating that authority to a student, it’s possible to give students permission to do some of that work. We don’t have the staffing to do it for them, but we can train their team in how to do it.
Or, if there’s one or two things that are really hanging someone up, like ‘I don’t understand this one error,’ or ‘this one article is the one that’s really getting me,’ we may be able to help with that.
[Editor’s note: The Wright Center is also here to help researchers with their publication submission. Contact the expert listed on the center’s Cite & Submit webpage.]
What’s a valuable library resource that more VCU researchers should know about?
There’s tons of them, but on the topic of public access and publication submission: If the hang-up is not a technical problem, and a principal investigator is worried about the license or the terms of use that they signed when they agreed to publish with a certain journal, we have a person who specializes in publishing licenses and author agreements.
And that’s a really good topic to educate graduate students and young researchers about, too. A lot of times PIs are signing away their intellectual property and don’t realize that they have signed away their intellectual property. We can train young researchers on what makes a good author agreement and how to avoid predatory publishers.
Another resource: every department has an assigned subject area librarian. And that person can be a pathfinder for researchers to all the other wonky, unexpected things that we do at VCU Libraries. Find out who yours is and use them as a resource.
You can contact Nina Exner at nexner@vcu.edu.
