The Francis Crick Institute, London.
included “the challenges of persuading researchers to follow new sets of rules.” Beth said: “A big part of the job ad was that they wanted someone with knowl- edge of data research management – it is one of the services they are building in the next few years. It is one of the reasons why I was appointed – I did this work at Nottingham University.
“I came in when we were trying to get people to buy in and follow a new policy. So, I spent the last three years helping researchers understand policies, explaining why we’re putting these requirements in place and then encouraging them to do it. “At the Crick, their researchers are already doing a lot of data management and open research, but in quite an independent way and the library hasn’t been formally helping with that. One advantage at the Crick is that all research at the institution is funded by MRC, CRUK and Wellcome, not just by individual researcher’s grants. And these organisations have clear ideas about what they want people to do with open research and what direction they’d like to move in. It is part of the ethos of the funders and the institution, but it will still be difficult to push forward best-practice across the board… because it always is.”
24 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
She thinks this is where the strength of a library lies. “It’s less about asking people to follow rules – although there are rules. The key is getting them to see the vision that it will improve their research, make it more reproducible and reliable, and give it greater impact. It’s much better to talk to people about that, rather than about ‘well your funder says you have to put it into x,y,z…’.”
Covid in a bottle
Beth is a little in awe of the Covid effect, saying: “One of the things that was really interesting about Covid is that we’d spent years trying to get people to use the cloud for data storage and Teams for collaborative working. Then everyone went home in May 2020 and switched. Just like that. A thing that we’d spent years trying to change-man- age.
“We can’t have a pandemic every time we want people to change digital technologies but it worked very well this time. It was the need. Often, we’re trying to change things and people can’t see why. The pandemic showed people the need and they immediately changed. It’s a really interesting thing to think about because when people see it as necessary, they are quite happy to change. But usually they think we’re just saying ‘change this’ because we say so. Or it’s our latest fad and it will change again in two years. I can see why people are resistant to it at that point.”
Stamina needed Beth says technology in higher educa- January-February 2023
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