IDCC25: The greatest discoveries made from your data will be made by someone else…..

March 28, 2025

Mary Ann Tuli and Bastien Molcrette provide a write up of IDCC25 at The Hague. 

“The greatest discoveries made from your data will be made by someone else…..”

This deliberately provocative phrase, uttered by a conference participant, sums up the challenge of preserving scientific data: to make useful information available to those, present and future, who are best placed to use it to its full potential. Bastien Molcrette and Mary Ann Tuli from the GigaDB curation team were present at the 19th International Digital Curation Conference 2025 (IDCC25), held in The Hague (Netherlands) from 17-19 February 2025, and here we summarise some of what was presented and discussed at the conference. This is a conference that we’ve attended before in the past (see write-ups from 2011 and 2024), and which after a break for COVID is nice to have back on the conference calendar.

Workshop Day

We both attended the first workshop hosted by Physical Sciences Data Infrastructures (PSDI) which provides physical infrastructures for data management in the physical sciences. They presented DAMAP, a tool that provides data stewards with templates to help them write DMPs (Data Management Plans). During a roundtable discussion, each participant shared their challenges with data management; one striking observation was that we should consider the cost of a poorly curated dataset (financial, physical resources, time, etc.), which can only be efficiently addressed with data stewards.

The second workshop, “Future proofing data management“, also focused on the use of DMPs and how to improve the flow of metadata into and out of DMPs. We had an introduction to DMPonline, a well-known tool which help data stewards manage DMPs. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC; Edinburgh, Scotland) has developed a checklist to provide guidance for creating DMPs.

Conference Day 1

After a welcome from Kevin Ashley, the Director of the DCC, we were treated to a wonderful keynote presentation from Marta Teperek, Programme Leader of FAIR Data & Open Data at Open Science (The Hague, Netherlands).

Her talk “Evolution of curation/data management over the past 20 years, current challenges; thoughts from 12 female leaders”, focused on the evolution of FAIR since its inception in 2016. Marta asked senior women scientists what they considered to be the most important milestones of FAIR over the last 20 years, what challenges the future holds and how the community will face these challenges. As well as describing the many organisations, databases and resources that have the FAIR Principles at their core, Marta described the importance of the role of data stewards in fulfilling these principles, reinforcing one of the take home messages from the previous days’ workshops..

After the keynote, the presenters of each of the 47 posters had ONE MINUTE to “’sell”’ their poster to the delegation. [Mary Ann] “I have been to countless conferences and this is the first time I have seen this. What a great idea! It allowed me to shortlist the posters I wanted to see and note down any questions I had”.

The first of two parallel Lightning Talk sessions took place in the late morning. The “Sustainability” track included a talk by Mary Ann Tuli from GigaScience Press. The title of Mary Ann’s talk was “Promoting Fair Principles And Research Integrity Through Manual Curation Of Manuscripts at the Point of Submission” and she went into detail about the importance of manual curation PRIOR to peer review, and how. The curators plays a crucial role in ensuring that FAIR criteria are met, allowing peer reviewers to focus on the evaluation of the manuscript.

The parallel track “Systems and Services in Development” opened with a presentation of best practices for software repositories by André F. R. Padilla (RIVM, Utrecht, Netherlands). His advice focused on ensuring the long-term stability of these repositories, such as having at least two maintainers per repository.

Miranda Barnes (Thoth) presented an original study on open books and their specific metadata, and introduced the Thoth repository as an open platform for providing management tools for open books. Another interesting presentation by Steffi Genderjahn (Helmholz Open Science, Potsdam, Germany) introduced the PID Network Germany, an initiative that aims to create a roadmap for PIDs (persistent identifiers) for scientific resources. A striking observation from this talk was the low level awareness of certain PIDs, such as the ARK, SWHID or RRID.

The first Paper Session took place after lunch. In the “Education & Training” track, there was a fascinating talk “From the Research Cycle to the People Cycle: Humanising Digital Curation“. Three very engaging women from Mississippi State University Libraries made curation seem like a thrilling rollercoaster ride! Here they are teaching students and faculty members about digital curation. Lauren Geiger (Digital Archivist), Kathryn New (Digital Humanities Librarian) & Caroline Siniscalchi (Data Science Coordinator) are working hard to make digital curation relevant to the skills researchers already have and to cut through the jargon. By teaching researchers how to manage their data, they empower them to be proactive in ensuring that their data can be understood and used. They suggested adding the ‘people lifecycle’ to the existing research and data lifecycles. A delegate asked if the programme had been rolled out to other universities, and although it had not yet, we were told that training materials could be made available.

In the “Curation Infrastructure” track, we had the opportunity to hear about best practices for research retractions in Renate Curty‘s talk “Managing Retractions and their Afterlife: A Tripartite Framework for Research Datasets“.The FORCE and COPE organisations have published a set of guidelines developed by working groups. A key element presented in this talk was the need to keep track of retracted studies; the best way is not to delete them, but to inform, update with disclaimers and/or restrict access.

The final presentation in the ‘National Perspective UK’ track was given by Pen-Yuan Hsing (University of Bristol, UK). Their team conducted semi-structured interviews with 52 professional data managers from 21 institutions in the UK. The interviews revealed that the primary obstacles to open data include insufficient reward and recognition, the frequent omission of curation work and their associated expenses in grant proposals, and the prevailing preference among researchers to create their own datasets instead of utilizing publicly available ones. One of the recommendations was to incentivise the sharing and reuse of open data, and to develop systematic assessments of data management in grant applications. A full report of the study will be made publicly available likely by the end of the year.

Conference Day 2

The third and final parallel Paper Session took place on Wednesday morning. In the “Sensitivity and Transparency” track, Jian-Sin Lee (University of Michigan School of Information, USA) presented a paper “The Data Came in Waves: Fluid Data Sharing and Reuse During Covid-19“. This was a very interesting talk by a very engaging pre-doc. The findings presented were the result of interviews with university team members, with the results challenging common assumptions about stable data.

Key points of the talk were the challenges presented by this new type of data; that sharing it was necessary and urgent, that the data was in flux or previously unknown, and that the data was ‘fluid’ i.e. it could be replaced or withdrawn. Referring to the title of the presentation, Jian-Sin explained that data coming in waves did not necessarily mean that there was a large covid outbreak, but that it was a reflection of how the data was reported or collected.

The “Balancing transparency against privacy” track focused on RDM (Research Data Management) and how institutions are developing their data management policies. Rebecca Taylor-Grant’s (Taylor & Francis, London, UK) talk “Making Reproducibility a Reality by 2035? How Tier2 is Enabling Publisher Collaboration for Enhanced Data Policy Enforcement” discussed how adding a curation layer to the publishing and peer-review process could identify flaws and allow studies to be curated before they are published. This was one of the main outcomes of the TIER2 initiative, which brings together publishers (including GigaScience Press) to think about best publishing practices; a handbook of good practice for editorial data is in preparation.

 

Kirsty Merrett (University of Bristol) gave a very dynamic presentation, “Agents Of Change: The Journey Of Updating An RDM Policy, And How It Can Act As A Catalyst For Reimagining Open Research Policy” where she presented how their group have updated their RDM to meet future data management challenges, such as the increasing diversity and volume of data in research; for her impressive presentation, Kirsty was awarded the Best Talk Prize at the end of the conference!
The “Systems and Services in Development IV” track of the final Lightning Talk Session began with a presentation on Software Heritage by Morane Gruenpeter (Inria, France). She presented the latest developments of Software Heritage, such as its collaboration with Zenodo; all Zenodo repositories with code are now automatically ingested into Software Heritage for backup and discoverability purposes. CodeMeta was presented as a tool to help researchers provide metadata for their computational frameworks, and a generator has been developed within this framework.

Next, Marcus Schmidt and Hanna Lindroos presented the FAIRagro consortium and its new helpdesk to help researchers in the agricultural sciences manage their data. Finally, in her talk “Meeting domain-specific requirements for FAIR data and software”, Madeleine de Smaele (4TU.ResearchData) presented the latest developments in data management at the TU Delft Library and the CODECHECK project to develop a network of  independent “code checkers” from local institutions to check and confirm that submitted codes are fully functional (a scheme we have been pleased to test ourselves and endorse).

The conference ended with an emotional pre-recorded speech by Cliff Lynch, the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI, Washington DC, USA). In his talk, Cliff shared some personal reflections on the current state of the data curation community and the future challenges we need to address, such as integrating generative AI and promoting open science in a difficult political context. He ended the talk on a positive note, noting that among the conference attendees were surely the future leaders of the curation community who will shape the future of data curation. See you next year!

Mary Ann Tuli & Bastien Molcrette

March 28, 2025

References

Wilkinson, M., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. et al. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data, 2016 https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18

Teperek, M. (2025, February 17). Twenty Years Back Twenty Years Forward: A Community’s Journey: Navigating Challenges Through 12 Voices. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14882183

Tuli, M. A., Fan, Y., Hunter, C., & Molcrette, B. (2025, February 18). Promoting Fair Principles And Research Integrity Through Manual Curation Of Manuscripts at the Point of Submission. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14933132 

Ramos Padilla, A. F., Kooijman, M., Leenarts, E., Houweling, J. (Johanne) M., Groot, N., & Joung, I. (2025, March 6). Implementing reuse practices for research data in the RIVM. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.21945/4be608c9-677b-49f3-9f3a-1f194032f888

Barnes, M. (2025, February 18). Thoth Open Archiving Network (TOAN) Update: Lessons Learned & New Directions. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14927245

Geiger, L., New, K., & Moriani Siniscalchi, C. (2025, February 18). From the Research Cycle to the People Cycle: Humanizing Digital Curation. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15000714

Curty, R. G. (2025, February 18). Managing Retractions and their Afterlife: A Tripartite Framework for Research Datasets. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15008772

Hsing, P.-Y., Wheeler, J., Duncan, L., Strang, R., & Jacobs, N. (2025, February 18). Realising Open Data Principles In UK Research Institutions. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14984941

Yakel, E., Lee, J.-S., Tyler, A., Polasek, K., & Veinot, T. (2025, February 18). ‘The Data Came in Waves’: Fluid Data Sharing and Reuse During Covid-19. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15008870

Taylor-Grant, R., Cannon, M., Lister, A., & Sansone, S.-A. (2025, February 19). Making Reproducibility a Reality by 2035? How Tier2 is Enabling Publisher Collaboration for Enhanced Data Policy Enforcement. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15012859

Merrett, K. (2025, February 19). Agents Of Change: The Journey Of Updating An RDM Policy, And How It Can Act As A Catalyst For Reimagining Open Research Policy. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15012855

Gruenpeter, M., Granger, S., Monteil, A., Nivault, E., & Sadowska, J. (2025, February 19). Research Software Metadata Curation Roadmap. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14974488

de Smaele, M., Janssen, R., Bangert, D., & van der Heul, J. (2025, February 12). 4TU.ResearchData: Meeting domain-specific requirements for FAIR data and software. 19th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), The Hague, The Netherlands. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14856604