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JISC, EPSRC and DCC RDM awareness event at Nottingham

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:

  1. Long-term funding of data retention and storage
  2. Sharing sensitive and commercial data
  3. What to store and what to delete (is it cheaper to re-run an experiment for example)
  4. Obsolescence of software/data
  5. Quality of the research being impaired by RDM policy requirements
  6. Subject repositories versus an institutional policy
  7. National and international efforts on RDM
  8. Lodging patent applications and the timely release of data
  9. Costs of data management after the grant ends
  10. The area of PhD and data ownership and long-term responsibility for that data
  11. Metadata and contextual data (e.g. from email trails)
  12. 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.

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.

 

Hello

Welcome to the project blog for the ADMIRe Project based at the University of Nottingham.  You can read about the aims and ideas behind the project through the tabs above – and about the project team.

Bill