Better research in less time and fewer resources

Warning

🚧 This website and documentation is still in very active development and evolving quickly, so content could undergo substantial changes at any time 🚧

Visions

  • Better, reproducible, and open research done in less time and with fewer resources

  • Researchers with modern technical engineering-based and project management skills embedded in more research groups

  • Modern data engineering practices and research operational approaches established as a standard of practice when conducting research

Strategies

  • Create management groups to manage and coordinate centers and work packages in completing their deliverables.

  • Develop and implement cross-Steno Research Operations and modern collaborative workflows and practices that support the successful completion of each work package as well as improving research practices across Steno centers.

  • Optimise and reduce the time and effort spent between designing the work package studies and the final dissemination of high-quality research results.

  • Incorporate reproducible and open science practices into the research workflow to both improve the quality of research and reduce the time spent on data processing, analysis, and dissemination.

  • Build up inter- and intra-Steno knowledge and skill capacity (“upskill”) in non-traditional technical skills and knowledge such as software development, data engineering, operational management (including “DataOps”), and iterative project management practices.

Sciences lags behind in many practical and technical aspects

Science, while generating cutting-edge knowledge, lags behind most industry settings when it comes to practical, operational aspects. For example, while much of research done now relies heavily on software and computational work, funding agencies rarely fund software and data engineering projects, nor do many research groups hire these highly skilled technical personnel.

We hope, through Work Package 1, to establish these skills and needs as a core component of the DP-Next project and to help do “better research in less time”.

A core strategy is to establish a “technical” working group

By having a dedicated working group that works to fulfil the aims of this work package, we hope to emphasize the importance of these practices and to ensure they are implemented across all work packages. All groups will include a “tech lead” who has technical knowledge and skills and who will be a part of this technical working group, to help coordinate work package groups with these practices.

We aim to onboard and train the tech leads in these practices by embedding them in some work done at SDCA, where these practices have been developing and refining over the last several years.

Plenty of risks and challenges

The two biggest challenges we face with Work Package 1 are:

  1. The need for highly technical personnel who have sufficient fundamental expertise to understand and apply these practices, which we hope to minimise through the training and onboarding of the tech leads.
  2. The IT systems across centers that often don’t work well together, which we hope to reduce the impact of by having a dedicated research operations group.

We aren’t just support, we are a core component of research

While Work Package 1 forms the foundation to all work packages of DP-Next, and in many ways aims to support their success, our activities are an increasingly needed aspect of research throughout the world.

So, aside from completing the responsibilities and tasks we have for DP-Next, we also aim to produce tangible and usable deliverables that are independent and valuable on their own.