July 18, 2019

Today was our last site visit of the trip! We headed to Data Archiving and Networking Services (DANS), where we heard from three different speakers on what DANS is all about, scholarly communication and how it interacts with the internet, and data search practices. In the first presentation, we discussed how DANS is able to make research available to all through their archive. This connected in my brain to the library visit at TU Delft, because the goal of sharing research and inspiring others is the same, and it seems that DANS just does it on a larger scale. Also similar to TU Delft, the archive is able to show ongoing research, not just what has been published, to help progress science at a faster, more realistic pace than the way that the current publication system works. Additionally, it helps with the replication crisis by allowing results that would not otherwise be published to still be accessible to other researchers or interested parties. One idea which really interested me from this first talk was how cuts in funding for research lead to competition instead of cooperation. This caught my attention as a succinct way to characterize the replication crisis; rather than being committed to the scientific method and doing good research, labs have started pushing for a wow factor that is not replicable in the future, in the name of being published and employed in the present. Also during this presentation, we split into four groups and did an exercise about research infrastructure. Within our groups, we talked about how we would characterize research infrastructure, what components contribute to it, and how we might categorize those components. This activity really highlighted the interdisciplinary aspect of this program, because as our group members expressed what they think of as part of research infrastructure, it became evident what disciplines each of us had experience with. For example, people with a computer science background were focused on the digital aspects of research, while I was focused on a larger laboratory setting since that’s what I’m used to in psychology. The presenter talked about how there is no one definition of research infrastructure, and based on this activity I can completely understand why—even if there were one definition, it would have to be very vague in order to encompass every different type of research and the needs of that research.

The second presenter gave a talk about web links and how they interact with scholarly research. One of the themes that I’ve heard across multiple site visits is how archives are navigating the new digital world. Books and other physical artifacts will always be the same across time and it’s just a matter of preserving the physical copies, but in the digital age there is always a new way to store something, and so an artifact in one format may no longer be usable just a few decades later. The same is true for web links. Over time, there is drift in what a given web link will lead to, and what our presenter touched on is how DOIs can be used within scholarly research to ensure that a link will always lead to the artifact that you were looking for. This was especially interesting to me because for as often as I have been told to cite a DOI in a research paper (which is quite often), I have never been given a reason why. I think that now knowing the significance behind this step, I will be much more willing to seek out the DOI for every article I use.

After our site visit, Kleitia, Talia, Megan and I traveled to the beach nearby in the Hague. The weather wasn’t great, but our primary interest was in the ferris wheel. For nine euros we bought a regular ticket, but the wheel took us around FIVE times! We kept thinking it would stop on the next revolution, but then we just kept going. Although it was a great price for the product, you honestly don’t need to go on a ferris wheel for that long. It gets old pretty quickly. After we got off the ferris wheel we had to go immediately home because it was a full hour journey back and we all needed to meet with our groups to practice for our innovation proposal presentations the next day.