As the ADMIRe project reaches its final stages, we were pleased to host a large Research Data Management awareness event on The University of Nottingham’s main campus. The event was the culmination of extensive planning by Laurian Williamson and Research Graduate Services, It was designed so that Heads of Schools and senior Professional Services managers could learn about RDM and the impact this may have on their respective roles.
The event started with a buffet lunch, before continuing with a selection of enlightening talks from both external and internal speakers. Attendance was limited to 60 people and we were pleased to say that we had a full house, with only one or two seats being empty in the room. The agenda of the event is here: ADMIRe RDM Event Briefing and Programme
The speakers and their presentations are listed below:
Dr Simon Hodson, Jisc Managing Research Data Programme Manager: Hodson MRD Overview – Nottingham
Ben Ryan, EPSRC Senior Manager, Research Outcomes: EPSRC RDM (Nottingham June 2013)
Joy Davidson, Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Associate Director: Introduction to RDM DCC
Caroline Williams, Director of Libraries and Research and Learning Resources, University of Nottingham: ADMIRe RDM Event June 2013
Paul Kennedy, Group Leader, Security Group, IT Services, University of Nottingham: RDM-Launch-Data-Security
Dr Steven Bamford, Senior Research Fellow, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Nottingham: RDM meeting Steve Bamford Galaxy Zoo
The talks were followed by Q&A sessions and a panel discussion at the end of the afternoon. As would be expected, discussions were lively and we gave researchers the chance to ask the RDM experts and learn how other institutions are faring. Questions from the floor focused upon the issues around:
- Long-term funding of data retention and storage
- Sharing sensitive and commercial data
- What to store and what to delete (is it cheaper to re-run an experiment for example)
- Obsolescence of software/data
- Quality of the research being impaired by RDM policy requirements
- Subject repositories versus an institutional policy
- National and international efforts on RDM
- Lodging patent applications and the timely release of data
- Costs of data management after the grant ends
- The area of PhD and data ownership and long-term responsibility for that data
- Metadata and contextual data (e.g. from email trails)
- Anonymous data and data fusion (identifying individuals by fusing disparate data sets)
One poignant comment noted that the EPSRC deadline of 2015 is only two years away, so significant progress must be made in all of these areas if RDM is to succeed – both at Nottingham and in the wider research community.
Although this represents the final researcher engagement session for ADMIRe, it is not the end of RDM at Nottingham. Plans are in place for sessions such as these to continue throughout the coming years at Nottingham and explore and answer the questions that were raised today.