Monthly Archives: December 2019

DataVault user roles let you share access to archived data

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The Edinburgh DataVault is a secure long-term retention solution for research data.

Thanks to the hard work of our software developers in the Digital Library and EDINA, the Edinburgh DataVault now facilitates five different user roles. This means busy PIs can delegate the work of depositing and retrieving data, to members of their team or other collaborators within the University. It also allows PIs to nominate support staff to deposit and retrieve data on their behalf, or grant access to new members of their team.

Diagram representing a PI and two postdocs using the roles of Owner and Nominated Data Manager to share access to data in the DataVault

There are five user roles:

  • Data Owner
    Usually the Principal Investigator. Can add/remove other users to their vault(s).
  • Nominated Data Manager (of a given vault)
    Can view and edit metadata fields, deposit data and retrieve any deposit in the vault. May add/remove Depositors to the vault.
  • Depositor (of a given vault)
    Can view the vault contents, deposit data and retrieve any deposit in the vault.
  • School Support Officer
    Acting on behalf of the Head of School, may view all vaults and associated deposits belonging to the School.
  • School Data Manager
    Assigned only with the express permission of the Head of School, may view, deposit into and retrieve data from any vault belonging to the School.

Full details of the permissions associated with each role:
Roles and permissions

Support staff who need to view reporting data for their School, or admin access to their School’s vaults, should attend our training – Edinburgh DataVault: supporting users archiving their research data.

Further information on why and how to use the DataVault is available on the Research Data Service website:
DataVault long-term retention

If you have any questions about using DataVault please don’t hesitate to contact the Research Data Support team at data-support@ed.ac.uk.

Pauline Ward, Research Data Support Assistant
Library and University Collections
@PaulineData

New research data management tool on one-year trial: protocols.io

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Information Services aims to offer a research data service that meets most of the data lifecycle needs of the majority of UoE researchers without interfering with their freedom to choose tools and technologies which suit their work. In some cases cloud tools that are free to individual users are offered commercially as enterprise versions, allowing groups of researchers (such as lab groups) to work together efficiently.

The service’s steering group has agreed a set of criteria to apply when a tool is put forward by a research group for adoption. The criteria were developed after our two-year trial of the electronic lab notebook software, RSpace, and have been most recently applied to protocols.io. The protocols.io trial begins this month and will run for one year. An evaluation will determine whether to continue the enterprise subscription and how to fund it.

protocols.io is an online platform for the creation, management, and sharing of research protocols or methods. Users can create new protocols within the system, or upload existing methods and digitise them. Those with access to a protocol can then update, annotate, or fork it so that it can be continually improved and developed. There is interoperability with Github and RSpace, and long-term preservation of protocols through CLOCKSS.

Users can publish their protocol(s) making them freely available for others to use and cite or, with the enterprise version, keep them private. The tool supports the Open Science / Open Research agenda by helping to ensure that methods used to produce data and publications are made available, assisting with reproducibility.

Subscribing to the University plan will allow research groups to organize their methods and ensures that knowledge is not lost as trainees graduate and postdoctoral students move on. There are currently over 70 University of Edinburgh researchers registered to use protocols.io. You may follow these instructions to move your current protocols.io account to the premium university version. For more information contact data-support@ed.ac.uk.

Kerry Miller and Robin Rice
Research Data Support team