Introduction to STARDIT: Standardised Data on Initiatives: transcript

Key points

• Science for All is a not-for-profit that aims to teach people how to ask questions, not just give them answers.
• STARDIT aims to cover all initiatives, such as research, government policy and manifestos, with public data on who was involved, who funded them and what the outcomes were.
• Existing frameworks for reporting involvement are limited to health research or systematic reviews and to English, so STARDIT uses machine-readable linked data on Wikidata, which anyone can edit and which is translated automatically.
• The WikiJournals are free to read and free to publish, run by volunteers, and independent of large publishers, unlike journals that charge article processing fees of up to 2,000 US dollars.
• A STARDIT report can work as a protocol and be updated over time, linking to public data and later outcomes, and can include identifiers such as ORCID numbers.
• Nunn argues for evidence-informed educational policy and says education is the most important thing humanity can do.

Chapters

1. 0:00Science for All and teaching people to ask questions
2. 2:17Why data on initiatives is needed
3. 3:53Gaps in existing frameworks and the move to Wikidata
4. 6:26What a STARDIT report contains
5. 7:02Open access, publishing fees and independence
6. 9:15Transparency, ORCID and updatable reports
7. 11:06Uses of STARDIT and evidence-informed education

Full transcript

0:00My name's Jack Nunn. I'm director and founder of Science For All, which is a not-for-profit education organisation working to involve everyone in shaping the future of human knowledge. I think there's a lot of confusion in the world between what we know and how we know it. So, science being what we know and the scientific method being how we found that out. And I really want to be able to involve everyone in helping answer the question, what's the best way to teach people to ask a question? Something I want everyone to understand is that whoever you are, wherever you are, anyone can ask a question.

0:33And asking a question is the most powerful thing anyone can do. Well I started Science4All in 2018 and it was after the success of a project called Campfires of Science where we were getting local people out into the forest to understand a little bit about the wilderness around them. But not just to tell them the answers but to get them around a campfire to share knowledge but also to teach people how to ask a question. So what's out here? What's the best way to manage this? You know, what do we want and what don't we know and how can we actually find out what we don't know? I think what Science Hall is really trying to do is reclaim the word science from the kind of positivists, reductionists.

1:16And actually go, well, science just means knowledge. And how do we know what we know? And who gets to decide what we know? And we're trying to empower everyone to ask the question, how do we know this? Why do we know this? And what else do we need to know? So we do that in practical ways. For example, we've taught people to look for critically endangered species using DNA testing in the wild. And we've got many other projects as well. And the main principle of what we're trying to do is teach people how to ask a question, not just give people the answers. what if anyone in the world could have an idea or a dream and actually make that happen and that's what we're trying to do with science for all so hello my name's jack nunn i'm director of the charity science for all i'm also the strategy liaison for the wiki journals and i'm here today to talk about a project i've been working on with thomas and many other people

2:17called Standardised Data on Initiatives, which we're helping develop with the wiki journals. Being British, I drink tea and I sometimes sit on my sofa and eat a biscuit. And it struck me that I can't sometimes know for sure that my tea has been picked by people who are paid fairly. The rainforest hasn't been cut down to grow the cocoa or the tea leaves, or in fact, the timber for the sofa that I'm sat on, or that the clothes I'm wearing haven't been stitched by slaves.

2:51I don't know this because the data isn't available for me to make an informed choice. And I think the long term aim for Stata is that we wouldn't just include research, but we'd be including all initiatives, whether it's government policy, political manifestos, um data on manufacturing processes it's public domain data that describes who was involved who did what and who funded it and what were the outcomes and what were the methods used to involve people so standardized data on initiatives um it's something i've been thinking about for many years and uh something that i'll talk about in more detail about where it came from for a bit of background i've been working for over a decade to involve the public and patients in improving health services, health care and research. And certainly in what's called public and patient involvement in some areas, we're asking questions, what does it mean when we involve people in research? Well, who is involved and which tasks are they doing?

3:53Data sharing on this is quite variable and quite poor according to a scoping review that I did recently about public involvement in genomics research. So out of this work, you know, I discovered there were a few frameworks already where people could report who was involved in research and how. All these frameworks are very specific. So all of them are specific to health research or specific to systematic reviews. And they're also English language only so the idea of started was to try and create a way that people could report data about initiatives such as research using machine readable linked data um as director of science for all i'm also involved in in some environmental projects where we're doing environmental research and we're involving citizen scientists or involving the public in going out and gathering uh environmental DNA samples or helping us write protocols. So I was sat here going, is there a way that I can report how people were involved in a standardized way across disciplines? So whether it's health

4:56research, environmental research, or public policy, government policy, etc. These were these were the foundation thoughts for Stardic. I then got very involved with the wiki journals, and my good friend Thomas here told me about wiki data, which was something I wasn't particularly aware of even existed. And the more I learned about it, the more I realized a lot of the things I was hoping to do would start it where already possible with wiki data. So you can share information about things in a machine readable way. It's linked data. And it's also, and most importantly, it can be edited by anybody.

5:36and and perhaps just as importantly it's automatically translated into other languages so it isn't just english language specific so what we've got already here is is a data backbone uh of data about initiatives people research what have you that already exists um and so we decided to work in that, in Stardet, standardized data on initiatives, Stardet for short, because the governance structure, the legal structure is already managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is obviously a hugely trusted organization and the processes for creating data are already very well established. So the idea of Stardet is to create a kind of a ring around some data fields. So who was involved, what initiatives, how was it funded?

6:26And a StartIt report can be the minimum contribution is just what's the minimum information we have, you know, conflicting, competing interests, who is involved, who wrote the report. And then a larger StartIt report has more data, and we're currently collaboratively designing what kind of data that should be, and I can say more about that. So let's take the example of a Wikipedia page that gets submitted for peer review, you know, that might have had hundreds of editors over the past 10 years. And what Stardit allows is to report who those people were, maybe what their tasks were to a resolution that everyone agrees is useful and helpful.

7:02And I think the other thing to add just to what Thomas said that's very important about the wiki journals is that it's free and it's open access. And I think what the importance of that, really, I can't stress enough. everyone has probably had the experience of coming up to a paywall or finding peer-reviewed information that they can't access because they can't afford it. This is fundamentally against the principle of how science should work. Science just means knowledge and if people cannot access knowledge then you're limiting their ability to make all kinds of decisions and inform judgments and this is a huge issue in the developing world in particular.

7:41The point of open access is that it's free for everyone, and that's great. However, anyone who's tried to publish in an open access journal might have been faced with something called an article processing fee, which can be as much as 2,000 US dollars, which is a lot of money. And I can tell you, it's more than most people would afford from their own pockets to publish something. Now, as a caveat, publishers do an important job. The quality control is very important. and and people need to be paid for their time that needs to be valued of course um wiki journals are different at the moment we rely almost entirely on volunteers to do the whole process um and that means that it's free for people to publish and i think that's really important there are other free to publish open access journals out there and the importance of that is that it gives us an independence as well um it's rare but it's not impossible that there might be an open access journal that happens to be owned by you know a big publisher and this is this is a multi-billion dollar annual industry by the way publishing academic

8:43publishing more than film and music huge industry that makes a lot of people a lot of money and there are people who have certain interests financial or other that may wish to have certain issues not explored in journals that they own and there are examples of this happening online I think the importance of something like Wikipedia is that it is demonstrably independent. It's funded by donations. The entire process for deciding what's in or out is completely transparent and anyone can be involved.

9:15One of the issues at the moment, though, is that trust in who's involved, you know, and there's many examples of people in government editing their own entries about themselves or other political leaders or what have you. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but wouldn't it be nice to have a bit more transparency about who those people are and bring in things like, you know, the ORCID numbers, which is an identification number that a lot of academics use to associate with themselves. I think the first thing to say about STADA is it's probably everything that a peer-reviewed paper is in terms of who the authors were, etc. The advantage as well is that it can be updated over time, unlike a journal article which is published and then it's out there. So one thing that you can do with the STADA report is you can say, we're going to do this research.

10:02so a star report sits as a protocol and you can say we're going to share data about this research in this way so let's say you're working on the hadron collider and you say we're going to share all our data according to the fair principles findable accessible interoperable reusable i think those are good letters. So we're going to share our data according to their principles, and we're going to be funded by the government. And then you can have another update report going, here's all the data. It's all in the public domain. And what Stardet helps do is link to public domain data and link to that. It's not necessarily hosting all data from Hubble or the Hadron Collider. It's just saying, well, this is where it is. And this is how it's structured. This is who owns it. And this is how it's governed. And then more importantly, certainly for organizations like Cochrane or the Campbell Collaboration, which do systematic reviews into health or social issues, knowledge translation how has this knowledge helped or informed or improved lives or ecosystems then the started report can go okay this this paper is 10 years old or this this this research was done 10 years ago what was the what was the outcome or what were the impacts the potential

11:06applications of started are limited only by our imagination and it can be anything from a community arts initiative to an educational intervention to public policy or foreign policy you know there's a lot of things humans choose to do because they expect certain outcomes and we follow those outcomes and sometimes call that research but it's very important to bring the scientific method where possible to questions like educational interventions you know we are trying to achieve For example, if humanity wants to lower birth rates, slow down climate change, and improve air pollution, et cetera, we know one of the best things we can do is educate girls, specifically girls, because that reduces infant mortality, amongst many other benefits, of course, and thus also helps populations have less pressure to have more children, et cetera.

12:06So some of the education is is this hugely important. It's always been this centrally important thing in all cultures. But wouldn't it be nice to have a bit more evidence informed methodology for it, you know, for a government to come in and say, well, let's retrain ballerinas in cyber security was a recent suggestion from the UK government. It didn't go down very well, because frankly it was ideological based it wasn't evidence-informed and there was very little evidence that it was a sensible suggestion and it was rightly ridiculed I'm speaking from my personal opinion now by the way just to be clear I'm not speaking on behalf of any organizations rightly ridiculed But wouldn't it be nice if there was educational policy where they could say, we've got this idea, we're going to let students lead their own learning, we're going to have teachers learn with students, we're going to do this or that, and here's the evidence that we've used to inform this policy decision, and then in 10 years go, wow, guess what, your evidence-informed educational policy achieved the outcomes you said it would. How often does that happen in government or in manifestos? Not enough.

13:15and we're talking about the most important thing humanity can do, which is education, which is why Science for All is an education charity.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Introduction to Standardised Data on Initiatives (STARDIT) - Jack Nunn (Director of Science for All) for the WikiCite Conference 2020.webm by Jacknunn (2020-10-30), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.