On the ascent and with the summit in sight – Reflections on three years at Make Data Count

DOI: 10.60804/CQ98-3H62

By Iratxe Puebla

Three years ago, I took on the rewarding challenge of leading Make Data Count's work to build the tools, practices, and community needed to drive recognition for data as a primary research output. As I prepare to transition out of the role as Director of Make Data Count at the end of this month, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on what we have accomplished over the last years.

One of the first items I addressed in this role was the development of our strategic plan, informed by input from the Advisory Group and community members. An important exercise to guide the initiative's work, the strategic plan identified four key areas of focus around infrastructure, research assessment, sustainability, and establishing data metrics as the standard. The plan reflected the initiative's broad efforts, keeping focus on infrastructure for data-usage tracking, but also spanning beyond into driving positive change in practices and research assessment to make data evaluation and recognition the norm.

A key activity to support that cultural change was the Make Data Count Summit. The goal of this event was to crystallize conversations about the use and reach of data as their own topic, shining a light on the importance of meaningful data evaluation as a practice building on, but separate, from data sharing. We picked the designation of a Summit because it reflected the fact that we were still on the journey for data evaluation and recognition to become the norm, and that while the steps ahead may not be easy, we could see the endpoint we were working towards. The success of the Make Data Count Summits highlighted the community's needs in data evaluation and the support for dedicated efforts to advance on this journey. It was inspiring to see the community's engagement, and the collaborations that developed from these events. As an example, the discussion about tenure and promotion practices at the Make Data Count Summit led us to collaborate with session panelists to write the 'Ten simple rules for recognizing data and software contributions in hiring, promotion, and tenure'.

The Make Data Count Summits and other community forums showcased the increasing interest by groups and organizations in understanding data usage, and also that groups were experimenting with different approaches. Make Data Count had recognized early on that in order for data-usage information to be used, this needs to be captured and shared in ways that enable interpretation across sectors, platforms and domains. This motivated the work to normalize data-usage information through practices and tools such as COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data and the usage tracker. Continuing on this philosophy, Make Data Count became a co-leader of the Data Usage Typologies Working Group, a community effort to develop a uniform framework to describe data usage, which has recently shared its typology of data uses.

Infrastructure has remained a key area of Make Data Count's work. We have developed the Data Citation Corpus, an open aggregate of data citations to better understand how data is used in the literature. This project brought two key highlights for me. On the personal level, it gave me an opportunity to learn more about key metadata workflows for data and research information. For Make Data Count, it opened up new ways to scale data-usage information and provide the community with a tool to respond to growing data-evaluation needs. I have particularly enjoyed this project's focus on collaboration. The Corpus aims to elevate the contributions of groups that are already doing important work identifying links between datasets and articles, and it has been great to see the interest in contributing data citations from infrastructure providers such as Europe PMC, funders -ASAP, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-, and publishers. The identification of data-article links and their inclusion in research information workflows as important metadata is a shared challenge and has received attention through other community efforts such as the Barcelona Declaration and OSMI (Open Science Monitoring Initiative), which Make Data Count contributes to.

I am particularly proud of our work supporting inclusion of data in research assessment. This was a new area of activity for Make Data Count, and I value the collaborations we have undertaken to support steps toward recognition of data as important outputs in evaluation. In addition to ongoing collaborations with DORA and other open science and research assessment reform groups, last year I had the privilege of facilitating the collaboration between Make Data Count and HELIOS Open. This was a successful collaboration between institutional representatives and data experts, which resulted in key resources to implement inclusion of data in institutional processes like tenure and promotion. 

Our participation in the SCOSS program has been another valuable opportunity to engage with representatives of institutions and libraries, key constituents in the data space. Make Data Count has attracted important support from institutions in Europe, Canada and Australia, and I thank all of them and the colleagues in the SCOSS-supported infrastructures for their support, encouragement and valuable feedback.

Make Data Count's activities and my own would not be possible without our community members, partners and volunteers. I want to thank you for supporting me and Make Data Count over the last three years. Thank you to the Make Data Count advisers who have contributed their time and energy across all areas of the initiative, from strategic planning, to representing Make Data Count at events, and collaborating on different projects. I am also grateful to the colleagues at DataCite who have generously helped me with metadata and workflow queries, addressed infrastructure needs, and provided feedback and ideas. It has been a privilege to work with Clare Dean on our outreach and in preparation of our resources. And of course, many thanks to our many collaborators from across research, open infrastructure, publishing, funders, and institutions, for sharing valuable insights and for keeping us on track on what matters most to advance recognition for data.

Make Data Count will pursue its essential work. There will be more updates from the development of the Data Citation Corpus and approaches to identify data citations later in the year, and the initiative will continue to play a key role in collaborations with community groups to advance research assessment reform to recognize data and other open outputs.

The summit of data being recognized as a primary output is still ahead, but the community is firmly advancing on this path. I am privileged to have contributed to that journey. I'll remain an advocate of open science and responsible evaluation, and I look forward to seeing what the Make Data Count community will achieve next.