Author Archives: smacdonald

Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: Mar. & Apr. 2015

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9 EPSRC grant holders and researchers were interviewed as follow-up to the EPSRC Expectations Awareness Survey conducted in February.

A new leaflet detailing all systems in the RDM portfolio is being created, which will explain the Data Asset Register, and the use of PURE, in the context of all the systems available across the research lifecycle.

The PURE system now has a module that allows the datasets to be described. This fulfils EPSRC Research Data Expectations requiring datasets to be described and those descriptions made available online. Datasets described in PURE are shown as part of staff online profiles in Edinburgh Research Explorer alongside other research outputs.

The RDM Service Coordinator gave an invited presentation at the “Open access and research data management: Horizon 2020 and beyond” FOSTER Workshop, University College Cork, Eire (15 Apr. 2015) – https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/content/looking-after-your-data-rdm-edinburgh-institutional-approach

DCC and RDM programme staff to meet with key contacts in selected schools to discuss local support and draft guidance.

DataShare release 1.7.2 went live in April with a new default open licence – Creative Commons International Attribution, 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0) to replace the Open Data Commons Attribution licence.

Discussion is on-going between UNC-Chapel Hill, Data Library and colleagues in Web, Learning, and Teaching Division about collaborating on ‘MANTRA as a MOOC’ to be delivered next autumn.

ITI / Research Services are to investigate provision of a hosted GIT service for research software generated for research at the university.

RDM programme webpages in Polopoly are being checked for accuracy and compliance for their planned migration to Drupal.

All Schools in CHSS have now added links to the RDM Programme website and other RDM pages through their intranets. GeoSciences, Chemistry, Informatics and Mathematics in CSE have also added said links via their intranets.

Content has been finalised for the new ‘Working with personal and sensitive data’ RDM course.

Stuart Macdonald
RDM Service Coordinator

EPSRC Expectations Awareness Survey

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As many of you will already know EPSRC set out its research data management (RDM) expectations for institutions in receipt of EPSRC grant funding in May 2011, this included the development of an institutional ‘Roadmap’. EPSRC assessment of compliance with these expectations will begin on 1 May 2015 for research outputs published on or after that date.

In order to comply with EPSRC expectations and to implement the University’s RDM Policy, the University of Edinburgh has invested significantly in RDM services, infrastructure (incl. storage and security) and support as detailed in the University of Edinburgh’s RDM Roadmap.

In an effort to gauge the University of Edinburgh’s ‘readiness’ in relation to EPSRC’s RDM expectations, we are conducting a short survey of EPSRC grant holders.

The survey aims to find out more about researcher awareness of those expectations concerning the management and provision of access to EPSRC-funded research data as detailed in the EPSRC Policy Framework on Research Data.

We aim to conduct follow-up interviews with EPSRC grant holders who are willing to talk through these issues in a bit more detail to help shape the development of the RDM services at the University of Edinburgh.

We will endeavour to make available some of our findings shortly. In the meantime, if you want to use or refer to our survey we have posted a ‘demo’version below:
https://edinburgh.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/epsrc-expectations-awareness-demo

Should you decide to make use of our survey, let us know, as we can potentially share our data with each other to benchmark our progress.

(As an aside Oxford University have crafted a useful data decision tree for EPSRC-funded researchers at Oxford)

Regards
Stuart Macdonald
RDM Services Coordinator
stuart.macdonald@ed.ac.uk

Upadate: A link to the findings can be found at: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/datablog/files/2016/07/EPSRC-RDM-Expectations-Awareness-Survey-Findings.pdf

Highlights from the RDM Programme Progress Report: Nov – Dec 2014

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Key results from the regular RDM Programme Progress Reports presented to both RDM Steering Committee and Action Group. Full RDM progress Reports can be viewed on the RDM programme Wiki (University of Edinburgh only).

  • Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA) for the RDM programme was completed and published on the Estates and Buildings website (see: http://www.docs.csg.ed.ac.uk/EqualityDiversity/EIA/Research_Data_Management_Programme_%28RDM%29_%28IS%29.pdf)
  • Stuart Macdonald and co-author Rory Macneil (RSpace) had a paper (Service integraiton to Enhance RDM: Electronic laboratory Notebook Case Study) accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Digital Curation (London, Feb. 2015).
  • Work has commenced to update deadlines and deliverables in the RDM Project Plan.
  • Successful meeting held with the Software Sustainability Institute to discuss software preservation used/generated in the research process resulting in a number of areas of investigation (see: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/2014/12/
  • FOSTER EU proposal funded for a training event based on MANTRA to be given to the Scottish Social Science Graduate Summer School programme.
  • All items in Datashare now have DataCite DOIs.
  • Data Library have established a new online statistical analysis and visualisation service (SDA) which can provide an add-on service for DataShare.
  • 39 RDM Training courses scheduled for Jan-June 2015. Training materials for two new courses is also being prepared.
  • All data from College File servers complete with all data expected to have been migrated to Datastore by end of January 2015.
  • Positive review and report received on the DataStore Infrastructure by external consultant.
    Edinburgh DMP template revised based on Action group Feedback.
  • Visitors from Germany (Goettingen, November), Switzerland (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, December), and France (Sciences Po, December) met with IS colleagues to learn more about the RDM programme.
  • “Research Data MANTRA: A Labour of Love” (by Robin Rice) was published to Journal of eScience Librarianship following invitation and a peer review process: http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol3/iss1/4
  • Two submissions to the Jisc Digital Festival event in March (RDM Training with MANTRA & RDM Programme @ Univ. of Edinburgh) have been accepted.

Stuart Macdonald
RDM Service Coordinator

Research Data Spring – blooming great ideas !

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The University of Edinburgh have been busy putting ideas together for Jisc’s Research Data Spring project, part of the research at risk co-design challenge area, which aims to find new technical tools, software and service solutions, which will improve researchers’ workflows and the use and management of their data (see: http://researchdata.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2014/11/24/research-data-spring-let-your-ideas-bloom/).

Library and University Collections in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Manchester have submitted an idea to prototype and then develop ann open source data archive application that is technology agnostic and can sit on top of various underlying storage or archive technologies – see: http://researchatrisk.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Develop-a-DataVault/102647-31525)

EDINA & Data Library have submitted two ideas, namely:

A ‘Cloud Work Bench’ to provide researchers in the geospatial domain (GI Scientists, Geomaticians, GIS experts) with the tools, storage and data persistence they require to conduct research without the need to manage the same in a local context that can be fraught with socio-technical barriers that impede the actual research (see: http://researchatrisk.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Cloud-Work-Bench/101899-31525)

An exploration of the use of Mozilla Open Badges as certification of completion of MANTRA (Research Data Management Training), a well-regarded open educational resource (see: http://researchatrisk.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Open-Badges-for-MANTRA-resource/102084-31525)

Please register with ideascale (http://researchatrisk.ideascale.com/) and VOTE for our blooming great ideas!!

Stuart Macdonald
RDM Service Coordinator