Research Data MANTRA updates

MANTRA, the free online training course which provides guidelines for good practice in research data management (RDM), has recently been refreshed. The course content remains applicable to all research disciplines, and is particularly appropriate for postgraduate students and early career researchers who would like to learn more about managing their research data.

The latest release helps ensure that content from each of the eight learning modules remains up-to-date, with interactive elements across all units being revised to make them more user friendly, and new content added to some units.

Additionally, as part of the CEPAL, United Nations project some video content used within MANTRA has been translated. Claudia Vilches and Gabriela Andaur from Hernán Santa Cruz Library (Santiago, Chile) have helpfully translated several of the video interviews with research staff, and these can now be viewed with Spanish subtitles within MANTRA or on our Youtube channel, helping to widen accessibility to these training materials for researchers outside the UK. Please contact us if you wish to translate any of the MANTRA materials.

MANTRA learning units now available via Zenodo

In addition to being a free-of-charge online learning resource, all content from MANTRA is openly available for use and re-use by others. For those interested in developing their own RDM training materials based on MANTRA content, all MANTRA units (along with four sets of data handling exercises) are now available for direct download from the Zenodo repository’s RDM Open Training Materials community. The eight individual MANTRA units were created using open source software Xerte Online Toolkits and units can be imported and edited in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) such as Moodle. All that we ask is for attribution according to our CC-BY licence.

Content from a number of shorter MANTRA ‘taster’ units is also openly available from Zenodo. These provide an overview of RDM in four very short modules which can be edited so as to add information about local RDM support services, before deploying locally in a VLE or on the Web.