Today (1st May 2015) is the day when Universities have to be compliant with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC) data expectations. At Loughborough we have been working towards being compliant for the past 18 months or so.

These expectations require Loughborough to securely preserve data created by EPSRC funded researchers for at least 10 years. Metadata about any data created should also be public within 12 months of the data being generated. In addition, any article based on RCUK (including EPSRC) funded research should include a statement saying where the supporting data can be accessed.

Earlier this week our repository for archiving research data was launched. It can be found here: https://lboro.figshare.com/. As can be seen, the repository is based on figshare’s figshare for institutions offering and we have been working very closely with them to create a Loughborough instance to both preserve and highlight the research data created by Loughborough’s researchers. The back end archival storage is provided by Arkivum.

The repository has already been populated with the data from PLoS articles written by Loughborough researchers.

We have held a couple of workshops already and over the next few weeks and months we will be holding sessions where researchers and other interested parties (Librarians, Research Office staff etc.) can come and find out more about the repository and research data management (RDM) in more detail. The next two are currently planned for 13th May and 26th June. If you wish to attend you can contact me for more information.

The repository is only one part of our offering. I was recently appointed (March 2015) as Research Data Manager to help support Loughborough’s RDM offerings and we will soon be updating and expanding our webpages with more information and advice on RDM matters.

In the meantime, if you wish to find out more, or wish to deposit data in the repository, please do contact me (Gareth Cole) on g.j.cole@lboro.ac.uk. We have also set up a general email address in case I am out of the office. This address is rdm@lboro.ac.uk.