Managing your research data:

University support for researchers

Sally RumseyThe Bodleian Libraries

University of OxfordMary Harssch www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/132558912/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

1. Institutional view on why RDM important 2. Tools and services available3. DOIs and Citing data4. Top tips for research students

Themes

• Most universities are affected by similar internal and external drivers

• Most support activities are common to many universities• At different stages of progress• Examples from my own institution (University of Oxford)

Support for RDM at UK universities

• A number of factors are shaping environment of academic research– Dominance of digital media– Pressure by RCUK funding bodies to encourage

preservation of all research information / data / metadata

– Shift from exclusive focus on publication– Funding bodies encouragement of institutional

repositories– Pressure to make research data discoverable and

linked (whether live data or archived)– Recognition of value of intellectual assets

• Response: Emerging services for archiving data

Why are universities bothering to support RDM?

e.g. EPSRC policy framework on research data: Principles

www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/Pages/principles.aspx

‘Sufficient metadata should be recorded and made openly available to enable other researchers to understand the potential for further research and re-use of the data. Published results should always include information on how to access the supporting data.’

Meeting Funder Requirements

University of Southampton October 2005

• Oxford RDM Working Group• Academically led• RDM policy

• Collaborative services development to support researchers

• Research Services (grant writing, licensing legal issues)

• IT Services (active / live data)• Bodleian Libraries (advice, training and archiving)

Common model: ‘Research Data Oxford’

• Help with funding applications: writing technical appendices; meeting funders’ requirements; technical advice; experts to advise on how to structure data to answer this and future research questions; standards)

• Tools and services: eg advice what to look for in a data archive; directing researchers to national help [DCC] & data archives; checklists and workflows

• Customised DMP (Data Management Planning) tool (eg DMP20 https://datamanagementplanning.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/twenty-questions-for-research-data-management/)

• Services to support management of ‘live’ data (eg. ORDS)• Emerging services for archiving data: eg Upcoming pilot

release of service for catalogue of Oxford data and data archiving: ORA-Data

• The legal stuff: Sources of advice – data ownership; licences; permissions; sensitive data etc.

What are universities doing to support RDM?

RDM website: researchdata.ox.ac.uk

Single point of

information

• May be an extension to the existing publications repository.

Probably run by the library

• Data catalogue: Records for datasets located elsewhere

• Documentation and metadata describing the dataset

• Long-term archive to preserve data

• DOI for data citation (Datacite)

• High visibility • discoverable • sharable

Institutional data archive

• Key element of data archiving

• Attribution• Recognition and impact

• Discovery• Referencing• Potential collaboration

• Location• For access and re-use

• Re-use• Documentation of methods

and descriptions of data

Data Citation

www.datacite.org

• International organisation

• DOI agency for datasets

• Emerging de facto data

citation standard

1. Check your university [and funder] RDM policy2. Identify the people and information sources that can help you3. Are there any useful checklists and workflows?4. Check if there are costs involved at each stage of RDM5. DMP: Do you have one? Would having one help?6. Imagine the worst case scenario – what if someone stole your laptop/your

department went up in flames/ your data were infected with a virus etc etc. Would your data be retrievable?

7. Does your data require specialist software to run it?8. Can you make your data freely available? Anonymisation? What will you do

about licensing your data? What permissions? Are you authorised to assign a licence to your data? Are there commercial interests?

9. Check out suitable data archives10. Think about what to archive and how to describe and cite it

Ten top tips for RDM

Questions?

Sally RumseyThe Bodleian Libraries

University of Oxford

sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk