UKRI Digital Research Skills Catalyst
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF YORK
Abstract
The UKRI infrastructure opportunity report (UKRI, 2023) highlighted the immediate importance of increasing the number of professionals with digital, data science and artificial intelligence skills where demand has exceeded supply for some time. Our vision for the UKRI Digital Skills Catalyst is to evolve an existing digital infrastructure to support new communities of practice This existing infrastructure is the UKRI DaSH Network, a set of projects designed to train life scientists in digital research skills that were funded for two years under the Innovation Scholars: Data Science Training in Health and Bioscience funding call of 2020. The DaSH network has delivered nearly 10,000 person-training episodes over 136 diverse activities to the UK research and innovation community. It has implemented models to operate sustainably using a combination of making materials FAIR (Garcia et al., 2020) obtaining additional funding, having courses accredited and incorporated into CPD programmes and by charging for-profit organisations or for enhanced interaction.
We envisage the UKRI Digital Skills Catalyst being a distributed and highly accessible national digital research training and support service capable of underpinning ambitious and creative research and supporting the career development of digital research professionals across multiple domains. This will allow UKRI to maximise value from previous investments and addresses two of the five DRI strategic themes: “skills and career pathways”, and “foundational tools, techniques and practices”.
We aim to provide a high-profile portal from which the research and innovation community can discover high-quality and peer-reviewed training resources which are as open and FAIR (Chue Hong et al., 2022; Garcia et al., 2020) as possible. We also aim to provide a distributed training and support service capable of supporting a wide range of researchers. The demand for, and uptake of, digital research skills training is high as evidenced by the number of person-training episodes we have delivered. However, researchers typically need additional one-to-one support to apply ideas to their own digital research challenges. Individually, several DaSH projects addressed this need with community drop-ins and code retreats. We will substantially increase the amount of support available and the range of digital research challenges that can be addressed by drawing on a diverse pool of digital skills specialists across multiple institutions. These specialists will be research software engineers, data scientists, informaticians, or digital researchers and will form a community capable of developing the careers of its members through shared-practice and collaboration. We also aim to propagate the existing methods of FAIRifying, licensing, accrediting and charging more widely to enhance the sustainability of the UKRI Digital Skills Catalyst.
We envisage the UKRI Digital Skills Catalyst being a distributed and highly accessible national digital research training and support service capable of underpinning ambitious and creative research and supporting the career development of digital research professionals across multiple domains. This will allow UKRI to maximise value from previous investments and addresses two of the five DRI strategic themes: “skills and career pathways”, and “foundational tools, techniques and practices”.
We aim to provide a high-profile portal from which the research and innovation community can discover high-quality and peer-reviewed training resources which are as open and FAIR (Chue Hong et al., 2022; Garcia et al., 2020) as possible. We also aim to provide a distributed training and support service capable of supporting a wide range of researchers. The demand for, and uptake of, digital research skills training is high as evidenced by the number of person-training episodes we have delivered. However, researchers typically need additional one-to-one support to apply ideas to their own digital research challenges. Individually, several DaSH projects addressed this need with community drop-ins and code retreats. We will substantially increase the amount of support available and the range of digital research challenges that can be addressed by drawing on a diverse pool of digital skills specialists across multiple institutions. These specialists will be research software engineers, data scientists, informaticians, or digital researchers and will form a community capable of developing the careers of its members through shared-practice and collaboration. We also aim to propagate the existing methods of FAIRifying, licensing, accrediting and charging more widely to enhance the sustainability of the UKRI Digital Skills Catalyst.