CORD best practice #5 – documenting workshops

Continuing my blog series where I talk about my favourite items on our data repository, this time I’ve chosen an item that groups together several files on ‘End-to-end experiments personalised beverages design’, at https://doi.org/10.17862/cranfield.rd.7837817, from Professor Harris Makatsoris in Manufacturing.

As more services move to personalisation, the idea of customised beverages tailored to my preference was intriguing! But more than the subject matter, where Cranfield demonstrated the principles using orange juice, I love this record as it’s a great example of how CORD can be used to best share outputs from workshop-style experiments. This included ensuring they are thoroughly documented so that others can fully understand the work (without referring elsewhere) and thus enable them to reuse and cite the outputs easily.

As well as the spreadsheet of numerical results, which are the fundamental output data, there is accompanying information detailing the workshop and experiment plans, and also photographs of the workshops themselves. Not only does this help people understand the methodology and demonstrate robust and transparent research practices, it makes the whole item more appealing and engaging (maybe that’s why it caught my eye…).

Harris also gets bonus points for depositing the spreadsheets in csv format so they are accessible long-term – it’s good to remove as many potential barriers to access as possible (see our intranet file format guidance for more). It’s also worth noting that publishing data online with a DOI, in well-documented and accessible form, isn’t just something to do to please your Research Data Manager and win a figshare cup, but it’s essential for funder compliance! Responsible data management is a condition of the EPSRC funding of this project, but we do like to reward best practice here as well.

A final reward is seeing your statistics grow and this item has already been downloaded 30 times. Sharing your outputs is well worth the minimal effort, so I look forward to seeing more great items on CORD!

 

Image: Makatsoris, H. (2019) End to End experiments Personalised Beverages Design. Available at: 10.17862/cranfield.rd.7837817.