#lovedataweek: The research data team’s everyday life with data

Eva Borger
Wednesday 13 February 2019

We will use this post marking Love Data Week 2019 as an opportunity to reflect on how research data management at the University has progressed over the past year (see Our Research Data Management journey from 2018’s Love Data Week).

A shiny new website

It has been another busy year for the research data management service. We recently launched the new research data management web pages. These offer up-to-date advice on data management best practice, planning and the research data related services available at the University. Closely following our website launch was the introduction of the University’s new research data management policy, which sets out more clearly, how the University expects researchers to plan for, manage and publish their research data. We hope that our new pages will help researchers find the information they need to get started with managing their data effectively. However, as always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any queries about research data management!

Feedback from the RDM Advisory Group

We also held two meetings with the Research data management Advisory group to discuss current issues around research data management. We always look forward to these meetings, which are a great opportunity to hear of any concerns and progress and suggestions directly from researchers in the Schools. One of these suggestions was to develop discipline specific guidance for data sharing at the University, and with the group’s help, we have been able to take this to the next level. – Thanks for your support!

Everyday life

The biggest chunk of our work is of course supporting day-to-day data management and planning, the deposit and publication of research data in our data repository and recording research data that were deposited elsewhere.

New showcase: thesis data

Many research students and supervisors will be aware that the deposit of research data underpinning theses has now become an integral part of thesis submission at the University. As of today, there are 26 public entries for datasets underpinning theses on our research portal, with many more still to come. It is still a new process, so we stand ready to advise on any queries and now also offer a new training course on the topic.
Planning is also underway to record research theses in our research information system, Pure. While theses texts will remain to be available in the St Andrews Research Repository, utilising Pure’s features will allow us to provide DOIs for theses and establish links to information about related publications, funding projects and datasets held in Pure. – More about this soon!

Planning

In our everyday research data management life, we helped helping with 22 data management plans over the course of the past year, up from 11 in 2017. It is great to see this offer of support being taken up and we will continue to stay up-to-date with the latest policies and practices to support DMP writing in the future as well. If you receive positive feedback on your data management plan, we would love to hear about it and be able to share it with others at the University as a best practice example. – Get in touch!

Latest discoveries

Finally, we also looked for data citations and access statements in over 2000 of the latest publications from St Andrews researchers, alongside managing 640 new dataset records in Pure.
Hold on a minute… 732 dataset records? 2000 publications?? – Yes, that is correct. The University aims to maintain a full catalogue of the research data and similar digital outputs produced by its researchers, whether they have been deposited through our data repository or not. Again, this allows us to join up information about research data with information we have in Pure, about associated publications and funding. Being able to demonstrate compliance with funder requirements on open data is just one of the outcomes from this. It also enables us to showcase these research data through our Research Portal, which adds to their discoverability and potential for citations. Overall, it helps us track our progress towards Realising the potential of open research data.

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