By Andrew Creamer, Scientific Data Management Specialist
Brown’s Health Sciences Librarian, Erika Sevetson (R), poses with Brown’s Metadata Librarian, Ann Caldwell (C), and Brown’s Flow Cytometry and Sorting Facility Manager, Kevin Carlson (L).
The Brown University Library and Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) have begun an exciting pilot with Browns Flow Cytometry and Sorting Facility to support graduate students in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI) by providing the infrastructure to comply with federal research funder and publisher requirements for making data publicly accessible and teaching MMI graduate students data documentation best practices.
In the fall of 2014, Brown’s Health Sciences Librarian, Erika Sevetson, began looking at new cooperative models for providing science-related library services to Brown’s diverse scientific community. Erika felt that many faculty and students were unaware that there were new science librarians and emerging services that could be of help to them throughout the various stages of their research. Erika found an article in the Journal of the Medical Library Association that Brown’s newBiomedical and Life Sciences Librarian, Laura Pavlech, had published with her colleagues at UNC Libraries before coming to Brown titled, “Development of the Research Lifecycle Model for Library Services” (Vaughn et al. 2013 access the PMC version here). Erika felt thismodel could be adapted as a framework to present to Browns scientific research community the Librarys new team-based, diverse information and data-related services. These services span across the research lifecycle: writing the grant proposal, doing the literature review and citation management, planning for the management and documentation of the data, writing up and publishing the results, complying with public access policies, and archiving and preserving the data. This project with the Flow Cytometry and Sorting Facility represents such an opportunity for applying this team-based approach.
Dr. Laurent Brossay, Chair in Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Professor of Medical Science, and Kevin Carlson, Flow Cytometry Facility Manager, would like to teach the MMI graduate students best practices for managing and documenting their data and provide a way for them to comply with the emerging expectations from research funders that they make their data underlying their publications accessible to the public. This year federal granting agencies providing at least $100 million dollars in research grants will expect grant recipients to comply with public access policies for both publications and research data (see Executive memo here). At the same time, publishers such as PLOS have now begun requiring authors to submit a data availability statement with their manuscript that provides a link to a data repository for the public to access the minimal data set underlying their results (see the policy here).
In 2008, a group of scientists interested in improving the state of documentation for flow cytometry data published a commentary in Cytometry on the Minimum Information about a Flow Cytometry Experiment (MIFlowCyt) data standard, the minimum information required to report flow cytometry (FCM) experiments (Lee et al. 2008 access the PMC version here). This standard represents the metadata (see table here) that researchers should record about their experiments, such as the information about their data collection in their lab notebooks and in the documentation of their data files they create from laboratory instruments.Kevin Carlson would like to work with the graduate students to help them collect the MIFlowCyt metadata from the 3-laser, 15-Parameter BD FACSAria flow cytometer in his facility (see the instrument here). Andrew Creamer, the Scientific Data Management specialist, and Ann Caldwell, Browns Metadata Librarian, will then work with him, Courtney Anderson and Tim Erick, two graduate students conducting research in the facility, to ingest the graduate students’ analyzed data files and MIFlowCyt documentation underlying their future journal manuscripts into the Brown Digital Repository (BDR) and the raw data sets into the FlowRepository. These data and metadata files will then receive digital object identifiers (DOIs) from the Library that the students can submit as permanent links to their data in the repository to their publishers, for both peer reviewer and public access. The DOIs will also allow for them and others to cite their data in publications and research posters. In addition, Erika and Laura will provide library support for students writing and publishing their papers (literature review and citation management) and then work with the students to help them submit their manuscripts and comply with federal public access policies for their manuscripts.
Facility Manager Kevin Carlson shows the Library’s Scientific Data Management Specialist, Andrew Creamer, the3-laser, 15-Parameter BD FACSAria flow cytometer in his facility that the students will be using to collect the data underlying their publications.