Breaking Barriers: Higher Ed and Emerging RDM Solutions Must Work Together

The Hesitation Around Emerging RDM Solutions

Researchers in Higher Education (HE) institutions hesitate to engage with emerging RDM solutions for a number of valid reasons. These include concerns regarding data security, ability to address their unique clinical trial data privacy challenges, vendor longevity, procurement challenges, and integration complexity with existing legacy platforms and tools. All of this is compounded with a healthy dose of vendor skepticism, the inherent trust gap, and the fact that change is slow in HE.

The Changing Landscape of Research Data Management

However, there are also external trends that are impacting this which include growing compliance requirements such as FAIR principles, Indigenous data sovereignty principles of OCAP (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession), various privacy regulations in different jurisdictions, HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11, new regulatory requirements for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) such as NIST 800-171, and many others.

Research data itself is also increasing in volume and complexity as more inter-disciplinary and cross-jurisdictional research and more advanced techniques are employed. Resource-constrained IT departments with legacy systems, protocols, and tools struggle to keep up with these changing and growing requirements.

The Case for Engaging with Innovative RDM Solutions

It’s in this context that we believe HE needs to more effectively engage with innovative RDM solution providers. Providers that are putting forward ‘fit for purpose’ solutions that address security, data sovereignty, and compliance should be critically evaluated. It is these providers that are likely to have greater flexibility to be better positioned to respond to changing research needs.

The collaboration benefits go beyond addressing the core security, collaboration, and regulatory compliance issues but extend into being able to facilitate multi-institutional and interdisciplinary research and offer significant economies of scale and ROI for early adopters.

A Call to Collaboration - Building the Future of RDM Together

We believe that there is a massive strategic advantage that can be realized by HE institutions and RDM solution providers when there is a willingness to collaborate.  Where we have experienced a willingness to have mutual engagement in co-designing appropriate solutions to meet institutional needs, we realized mutual benefits. HE institutions benefited from the ability to significantly influence the design trajectory of the RDM platform and as a solution provider, we have benefited from the enormous subject matter expertise of the HE institution collaborators throughout the co-design, testing, and validation activities.

There are many ways HE institutions can undertake this collaboration without full commitment. These include:

• Evaluating a Sandbox Environment with Pre-Loaded Demo Data

• Conducting a Time-Limited Proof-of-Concept (PoC)

• Conducting a Small-Scale Pilot with a Specific Research Team

• Evaluating Limited API or Integration Testing with Legacy Platform(s)

• Evaluation of a Freemium or Tiered Access to the Solution

• Conducting a Data Security & Compliance Assessment of Current State Practices vs. RDM Solution

• Holding Researcher-Led Usability Study/Focus Groups

• Supporting a No-Cost Data Migration Trial With Rollback Option

• Pursuit of Joint Grant or Funding Proposals

myLaminin has had excellent experience with these approaches and in return, HE institutions have derived significant ROI on their investment of effort.

Conclusion

HE institutions have some very valid concerns regarding engagement with emerging RDM solution providers but they have shared goals in addressing security, collaboration, and regulatory compliance. Such a partnership goes a long way to address these challenges and accelerate the development of solutions to address them. Indeed, in our experience, this has led to the further advancement in areas such as research data providence and research data sharing, methods to enable a tighter integration between RDM solutions and academic journals to increase confidence in published research, and methodologies to establish and enforce Indigenous data sovereignty.

In our experience, every HE institution that has collaborated with us in this fashion has derived direct benefits in influencing the design and implementation of certain modules and features that are now core to our platform and service offering. 

In short, Institutions that work with innovative vendors gain a competitive edge in compliance, funding, and data sovereignty.  Let’s discuss how we can support and accelerate your institution’s research data strategy.

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Ash Bassili (article author) is the CEO of myLaminin, a secure research data management platform for academia using blockchain and web3 technologies, who brings a rich 30-year global experience base in emerging technology delivery. Ash has a BSc Hons Life Sciences from Queen’s University, a MSc in Information Technology from Johns Hopkins University, and a Certificate in Blockchain Technologies from MIT Sloan School of Management.