PLATFORM

Data Management Core Facility: a platform to help you manage your research data

The Institut Pasteur's new Data Management Core Facility was set up in February 2020 to offer support and expertise in data management to scientists on campus.

Data management skills are becoming increasingly crucial, with the scientific community being called on to uphold the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and funding bodies imposing various requirements.

The Core Facility is on hand to help you with your projects, especially:

  • planning and anticipating data management needs

  • creating, testing and validating databases

  • implementing consistency checks to ensure the quality of data and metadata

  • long-term data preservation (choosing standard, open-source formats) and sorting data that needs to be preserved

  • sharing data with the scientific community in compliance with regulations

  • drawing up documentation and user and training guides

  • implementing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles

The data managers in the Core Facility are already working on a number of projects involving large volumes of data, specific clinical requirements or a wide variety of data (e.g. AIMS-2-Trial, CATH-GE and Abcess 2).

The Core Facility is also actively involved in campus-wide activities such as structuring research data, especially by helping develop a data management policy for the Institut Pasteur, organizing data meetings and reflecting on the best way to implement the FAIR principles in research practices.

The Core Facility manages and administers the REDCap® eCRF tool for collecting and managing clinical and epidemiological data. REDCap® was introduced at the Institut Pasteur in 2018 in the Information Systems Department. The tool is used by several teams on campus, and the COVID-19 pandemic has considerably increased demand.

Back in late February, the Centre for Translational Science and ICAReB approached the Core Facility to create most of the eCRFs for the CORSER seroepidemiological study. The teams in the Core Facility were subsequently involved in new research projects such as RCCOVID and SocialCov, a survey via social media to collect and analyze data about people's contacts to help understand and analyze the spread of the virus.

To ensure that REDCap® can handle such a rise in demand, especially given the increasing number of simultaneous connections associated with the use of surveys, the Information Systems Department teams have been working hard to analyze needs, boost security and improve performance, in a record time so as not to slow down current projects.

REDCap® has successfully withstood the increase in demand, especially for the SocialCov survey, completed by more than 42,000 respondents in less than a month, including 700 simultaneously when the survey was launched.



Graph: Number of simultaneous connections to REDCap® between March and June 2020

To find out more about the activities of the Data Management Core Facility, submit a project or receive advice about data management best practices, please write to: datamanagement@pasteur.fr

The Core Facility can also offer you support with REDCap® – write to redcap@pasteur.fr

If you use REDCap®, don't forget to cite the tool in your publications. A citation template is available here: https://projectredcap.org/resources/citations/

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