Emerging Good Practice in Managing Research Data and Research Information within UK Universities

Abstract

Sound data intensive science depends upon effective research data and information management. Efficient and interoperable research information systems will be crucial for enabling and exploiting data intensive research however it is equally important that a research ecosystem is cultivated within research-intensive institutions that foster sustainable communication, cooperation and support of a diverse range of research-related staff. Researchers, librarians, administrators, ethics advisors, and IT professionals all have a vital contribution to make in ensuring that research data and related information is available, visible, understandable and usable over the mid to long term. This paper will provide a summary of several ongoing initiatives that the Jisc-funded Digital Curation Centre (DCC) are currently involved with in the UK and internationally to help staff within higher education institutions prepare to meet funding body mandates relating to research data management and sharing and to engage fully in the digital agenda.

Academic libraries’ role in Research Data Management Services: a South African perspective

“…As Pinfield, Cox and Smith (2014) assert "research data management is a complex issue involving multiple activities carried out by various actors addressing a range of drivers and influenced by a large set of factors". According to Davidson et al (2014), researchers, librarians, administrators, ethics advisors and IT professionals all have a vital contribution to make in ensuring that research data and related information is available, visible, understandable and usable over the mid-to long-term. These services are provided in complex environments and require systematic and holistic approaches from many of the key players involved in research support services.…”

Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap—Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice

“…Universities, funders, and journals can play an important role as well, e.g., by setting proper incentives for a research practice improved in terms of curation, e.g., [17,19,25,28]. Notably, more stringent enforcement or extension of scope of existing guidelines, might already trigger some progress, e.g., by applying existing publishing guidelines to supporting material instead of leaving all responsibility with the authors.…”

“…This includes dealing with data that are in regular use, e.g., The curation gap has several perspectives: The first perspective is that of curation itself. The need for digital curation is well acknowledged [22] and many institutions such as universities, funding agencies, and dedicated institutions from the private sector or at the government level are devoting considerable efforts towards it, e.g., [16,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Initiatives and competence centres such as the Digital Curation Center (www.dcc.ac.uk), DataONE (www.dataone.org), PANGAEA (www.pangaea.de), ANDS (Australian National Data Service, ands.org.au) and a number of others have worked successfully to establish services and best practices.…”

“…Some researchers ask for better support, including that from their home institutions as well as from national or international infrastructures [19]. Others have made efforts to provide such a support and currently an active community of librarians, archivists and similar information experts are busy providing the necessary means, e.g., [16,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. But will this suffice to narrow the seemingly widening curation gap?…”

Promoting data sharing among Indonesian scientists: A proposal of generic university-level Research Data Management Plan (RDMP)

“…Good data management will support scientific discovery (Wilkinson et al 2016), but at the other end we have been observing cultural barrier in data sharing (Davidson et al 2014). More insights about data sharing and the diverse perceptions among scientists in various fields have been endlessly discussed (Tenopir et al 2011, Tenopir et al 2015, van Panhuis et al 2014, Wallis et al 2013).…”