Author Archives: Sue Manuel

UK HEI RDM survey

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Loughborough University has been conducting a survey to discover what services UK Universities offer for managing research data created within their institutions. Martin Hamilton wrote about the survey in a post titled ‘UK Higher Education Research Data Management Survey‘.

The questionnaire was divided into four main themes:

  • About RDM at your institution: this covered demographics and whether a research data management policy or service was available.
  • For Institutions with a RDM service: we asked about the scope of the service and range of data covered, whether data sets and/or metadata stored, software used, available institutional/researcher storage, charges and staffing.
  • Support: respondents were asked to select from a list of broad categories of support available for research data management.
  • Other information: the usual free text box for respondents to provide any additional information they wish.

There has been a good deal of interest in the survey with many interesting responses to the questions posed. Results will be posted soon.

DCC research data management planning training

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We have had another brilliant training session from the Digital Curation Centre. Once again the topic was research data management planning but this time looking at costing for RDM. The outline for the session was as follows:

  • Introduction
  • What are Data Management Plans and why are they important?
  • Funders’ policies on data management and eligible costs
  • Q&A Discussion: key issues affecting support provision
  • Data Management Plan Examples
  • Breakout session for discussion the example plans
  • What next? Planning future DMP support

Feedback from participants was excellent and I now have some useful resources to help those creating a research data management plan. I will compile these into a post soon.

Anonymising data

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There are a number of really helpful sources of information on anonymising research data for sharing.

Research data management policy creation

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We have a draft research data management policy progressing through various working groups and then on to committees at the University. However, we could not have reached this stage without the support of staff from the Digital Curation Centre. They gave a workshop where they advised us on the points our policy should cover and directed us to appropriate policies of other universities.

The starting point was to consider RCUK’s common principles on data and how we might align our research data management policy to these principles. We then looked at examples of research data management policies from other universities. We were particularly impressed with the University of Edinburgh’s research data management policy and this provided the starting point for our own policy. Talking through this policy and  others we realised that it was possible to separate policy statements and stakeholder responsibilities. This is exactly what the University of Oxford have done in their policy on the management of research data and records. So, we have incorporated elements of this policy too.

The Digital Curation Center

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We were very fortunate to have support from Digital Curation Centre (DCC) staff when devising some research data management training sessions, drafting our research data management policy and having a first look at data management planning. They facilitated three sessions to kick-start our research data management activities and these were well received by all in attendance.

We are hoping to arrange another event with the DCC in the autumn and we are looking forward to more enjoyable and rewarding sessions.

Incidentally, the DCC have a wealth of information and support on all matters relating to research data management. Some of my particular favourites at the moment are listed below.

  • Digital curation – if you want to understand what digital curation involves and why it is important take a look at this section of DCC’s website.
  • Data management plans – invaluable resources when writing a data management plan for a project or research funder.
  • Case studies – wondering what other people are up to? Check out these cases studies to learn about research data management in action.

RDM training

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Feedback from attendees at a recent RDM overview session in the University Library pointed to a few areas of concern:

  • Protecting future research based on data collected in a project.
  • Difficulties in sharing due to confidentiality agreements signed by participants several years ago. Participants can not be contacted retrospectively as the sensitive nature of the research demanded that personal details were not retained.
  • Computer Scientists have practices in place for dealing with data – de-duplication, compression, etc.
  • Requirement for service to support data processing and analysis – High Performance Computing.

These illustrate areas where advice and guidance would be welcomed and where there is a need to raise awareness of existing services. For example, some funders are happy for grant recipients to protect access to their research data so that they can publish the results of their research. EPSRC is one such funder, check out their research data principles (http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/Pages/principles.aspx). In addition, we have a High Performance Computing service at Loughborough and researchers can request time on this (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/services/it/specialist/hpc/).