Because good research needs good data

research data

The Arts and Humanities Research Council is making some significant changes to its research data policy implementation. From Monday 29th March 2018, it is removing its requirement for a Technical Plan and as such disbanding its Technical College. In its place will be a requirement to submit a Data Management Plan.

The EU FP-7 project RECODE has released findings of its case studies in open access to research data. RECODE (Policy RECommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe) held its final conference last week in Athens, coinciding with publication of a short booklet summarising the project findings and the following ten over-arching recommendations:

This new checklist aims to help UK Higher Education Institutions aid their researchers in making informed choices about what research data to keep. It offers practical steps to apply the more general guidance in 'How to Appraise & Select Research Data for Curation', and 'How to Develop Research Data Management Services', and is available here (along with those guides).

Tell us about your data!
It’s a big anniversary for us this year. It’s 10 years of the DCC and we’re celebrating by bringing a new concept to IDCC. You may have spotted on the Call for Papers that there’s a new type of submission – data papers.

Marieke and I were in Northampton earlier this week to run a 3 hour training session for librarians.
We've been really impressed with the work to emerge from the Jisc MRD programme and elsewhere so pulled together various aspects of the different courses. The course slides and an accompanying handbook (inspired by the Leeds RoaDMaP project) are available on the new RDM for librarians webpage.

The DCC has recently set up a mechanism to capture and reference examples of institutional research data management policies. We're doing this because we think it's useful to track their existence and because many people have told us that they would find it easier to create policies for their own institution if they could see some working examples. As a national coordination body, it's definitely our role to collate these.

The JISC-funded Incremental project has released its scoping study into researchers' data management needs at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow.
A blog post summarises our findings and implementation plans.
We welcome any feedback you have.