Category Archives: RDM survey

University of Nottingham Research Data Management Survey results

The results and analysis of the University of Nottingham Research Data Management survey are now available and the full-text report is available here:  ADMIRe Survey Results and Analysis 2013

The survey covered several key components of research data management (RDM) practice and provides a benchmark to measure progress against the RCUK principles on data. We do hope that the research community and all our Jisc Managing Research Data Programme partners will find something of interest in these results.

The survey was disseminated (using a variety of internal communication channels) to researchers across the University, and was an important part of the requirements gathering phase of the ADMIRe project. This served multiple purposes:

1. To baseline current RDM practices

2. To gather the researchers requirements for RDM

3. Raise awareness for the prospective service and gauge interest levels for the proposed service.

4. Identify areas where support, training, and advocacy were required.

We had 366 respondents, which was a very positive response rate and allows some valid conclusions to be made. Some interesting observations are:

  • The diversity of data types and the strong presence of non-digital data such as lab notebooks
  • Multiple locations for the data and therefore, the ad-hoc strategies of back-up
  • RDM training is high on the agenda
  • Low awareness of the expectations from research funders
  • Low awareness of funding requirements regarding data sharing

We welcome any comments on the survey and if you are interested in having access to the anonymized raw survey data, please do contact  us at <researchdata@nottingham.ac.uk>

 

ADMIRe RDM survey at the University of Nottingham

The more we become embedded with all things research data management (RDM) at the University of Nottingham the less time we seem to have to update this blog with our ADMIRe JISCMRD activities. I know how beneficial I find all the JISCMRD blog postings, especially learning from some of the projects which are at a more advanced stage than ours, so hopefully this posting will provide you with some idea of the work we have been doing.

July was a really busy month, so this is the first in a planned series of updates of some of our key activities that the ADMIRe team have been focusing on recently.

Research Data Management Survey

As Tom outlined in his blog posting earlier this month our research data management survey (using the Bristol Online Survey tool) was launched and will be open until mid September.We currently have 196 responses from researchers across all faculties. UoN is a research-intensive university with more than 2500 career researchers (excluding PhD researchers).

Our survey is aimed at all UoN researchers (including PhD researchers) and we wanted to discover how data is used and managed across the University. Requirements gathering on RDM is a key activity for us, we aim to deliver a sustainable RDM service which will facilitate and embed good RDM practice at UoN.

We will publish the survey results (anonymised) once they have been analysed, sometime during the Autumn. Some  interim results are as follows:

  1. 85% of respondents are creating or working with documents (txt, pdf, Word etc)
  2. 32% back-up their data daily
  3. 59% do not record or document any metadata about their data
  4. 66% work on externally funded projects
  5. 26% developed a RDM plan for their project
  6. 92% had not received any RDM training
  7. 129/196 respondents wanted to receive training in developing a RDM plan
  8. 49.0% said their research data was confidential to their research group
  9. 30% said they were unsure whether they were required to make their data publicly discoverable and accessible after the project closed
  10. 40% said they would not deposit their data in a subject/discipline specific respository and 48% weren’t sure

Plenty of interesting responses thus far for us to mull over. Tomorrow I will provide an update on our work with DAF and sensitive data, our planned RDM website, and other training and RDM awareness training activities.

 

RDM survey

Last week we launched our RDM survey across the University using the Bristol Online Survey tool.

So far the results are interesting, we’ve had 140 responses and the majority of people seem to be working with standard research files e.g. Word, PDF, Excel or software generated files.

Expect a full update when the survey closes.