Following on from our earlier post about Institutional readiness for managing research data, Stéphane and I have been looking at staffing levels in UK HEIs for establishing and supporting RDM. The data comes from our recent survey of UK HEIs RDM practices and a mapping to JISCMRD programme institutions.

A further set of indicators can serve to substantiate the argument that HEIs which took part in the JISCMRD programme are more advanced in the development of institutional RDM practice. These are the figures that relate to staffing levels for all the different categories of RDM-related personnel identified in the Loughborough survey of research data management activities at UK HEIs. The following tables describe this:

(*) It is reasonable to say that the mean, in this instance, is somewhat skewed by one responding university having 5.5 FTE employed in RDM related roles.

These figures are perhaps hardly surprising, particularly for the fixed-term staff, who might have been recruited specifically for the duration of the Jisc projects; it’s noteworthy though that institutions receiving Jisc funding have also invested much more than others in permanent staff.

 Full survey results and discussion are available in a blog post by Martin Hamilton (http://blog.martinh.net/2013/10/metadata-is-love-note-to-future-uk.html).