Spotlight on: Armel Lefebvre
Every other week, the Thematic DCCs and the Data Steward Interest Group (DSIG) put the spotlight on one research data steward working in the Netherlands to stimulate knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning.
What drew you towards the research data management field?
Around 10 years ago, I was working on my master thesis on reproducible research in bioinformatics at Utrecht University. I was doing an internship at a research lab at that time and I saw already how hard it was to keep the interactions between research methods, software and data traceable and maintainable. Even more, I had seen in practice how much efforts it was for researchers to implement software or integrate data from published studies that they found interesting to use. Since then, I am seeking to further develop research data infrastructure to address reproducible research challenges (among others).
What is an activity/task of your role that you find yourself looking forward to?
To achieve the right balance between automation and human-centered design to tackle reproducibility issues, or at least traceability of data, code, and results within all kinds of domains.
What is something unexpected that you can offer help with, if a colleague reaches out to you?
Actually, because I'm working as a researcher in my department not that many colleagues know that I'm also able to help with data stewardship matters. First, it's part of my research topic so I enjoy gathering more use cases of complex data management. Second, it shows that the differences between data stewardship and research can be quite blurry, as both are essential.
What do you think your community of research data professionals is missing?
We still miss somewhat easy solutions, I am mostly thinking about software because this is close to my software developer background. But it would be much more effective if we can offer researcher some integrated services to produce, manage and (openly) share research data than the (more or less) disparate set of tools we can offer today.
What is a topic you would want to collaborate on with others?
Designing and implementing a piece of software that shows researchers something like "We found 17532 issues with your data" and a "Fix it" button. I still believe there is a bunch of those issues that can be automatically dealt with, for instance inconsistent file names and so on.
How would you like to see your current field of work evolve in the next 5 years?
Keep removing barriers for good data management, that means that some of the technicalities we're asking researchers to handle now (like a generating DOIs) will be less necessary so we can focus on the quality of the materials that are archived behind those identifiers and how they can be (re-)used more easily.
Get in touch with Armel on LinkedIn
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