Tag Archives: Research Data Service

Data Management Training – Autumn 2025

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University of Edinburgh courses are now available to book on all topics dealing with research data management. Aimed at postgraduate research students and academic staff, these four courses are taught by experts from the Library’s Research Data Support team, and cover all aspects of managing digital data for a research project. Each course is offered multiple times during the term, at different campus locations and online.Young man with laptop on table with Edinburgh Castle seen through the window.

If you are new to concepts of research data management (RDM) you may wish to take the “Data Management for your Research” overview course (1.5 hours). You will be able to apply basic RDM skills to your daily research practices and understand what the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) mean and why they matter.

“Writing a Data Management Plan for Your Research”: in this interactive two-hour workshop you will understand the basic components of good DMP, and will produce a first draft Data Management Plan (DMP) for your research project using a tool called DMPonline.

Building on the University’s online Data Protection training, “Working with Personal and Sensitive Data” will prepare you for the challenges of dealing with human subject and other types of confidential data: how to collect, share, store and protect your data safely and securely, and what university services are available to help you (two hours).

“Archiving Your Research Data” (1.5-2 hours) helps you to plan ahead to when your logo datashare_edinburghresearch project is approaching completion and it is time to find an appropriate repository to share or safeguard the underlying data for your paper, thesis or dissertation for the long-term. You will gain familiarity with using the University’s open acess data repository, DataShare, and know about an alternative restricted access solution, DataVault, as well as how to identify other appropriate repositories. If you are unable to attend any of these scheduled Archiving Your Research Data workshops, you can request additional sessions via our online form: Request training: Archiving your Research Data.

All of the above courses are available to book through our scheduled workshops web page: Research Data Service – Scheduled workshops.

Robin Rice
Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support

US Government Data: Lost and Found

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Image of rescue tube with floppy desk and words Data Rescue ProjectActions by the current US Trump administration (and others, including Trump’s first term) have spurred archivists, librarians and activists to archive, capture, collect, crawl, hoard, mirror, preserve, rescue, track and save datasets produced at taxpayer expense and until recently made available on government websites.

For example, just as US federal research into climate change, or even mentioning climate, has been paused and government agencies defunded, so the datasets produced from these activities have been removed from public reach or disappeared. The same is true for health data around vaccine research (National Institutes of Health, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention), human subject data deemed to be furthering EDI – equality, diversity, and inclusion – (USAID), and longitudinal educational data measuring attainment and social mobility (Department of Education). In some cases, as on this US government web page from the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there are both items that are being decommissioned and archived, and others that are simply being decommissioned and deleted.

Particular challenges to archiving such data are capturing whole databases from scraping techniques, metadata loss, loss of provenance tracking (audit trail of changes), and the inability to add records or collect further data without massive government investment. Also, isolated efforts mean the data cannot easily be discovered.

Fortunately, the Data Rescue Project is coming to the rescue (along with other initiatives). It is a coordinated effort among data organisations and individuals, including librarians and data professionals. It serves as “a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk.” The web page provides a host of pointers to current efforts, resources, a tracker tool, and press coverage – including the New Yorker and Le Monde.

Researchers at University of Edinburgh who find that data they require for their research is being removed from publicly available sites may contact the Research Data Support team to discuss potential actions to take.

Robin Rice
Data Librarian and Head of Research Data Support
Library and University Collections

Outstanding Library Team of the Year – Times Higher Education Awards 2024

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This is a guest blog post written by Dominic Tate, Associate Director, Head of Library Research Support

The University of Edinburgh’s Library Research Support Team, of which the Research Data Service is part of, won the ‘Outstanding Library Team of the Year’ category at the Times Higher Education Awards 2024 in Birmingham on 28th November. The team plays a central role in the institution’s transition to open research, with the impact of its work spreading far beyond the Scottish capital. The team created and implemented a UK-first rights retention policy, enabling scholarly work to be published in an open-access format while the authors retain the rights to their work.

Members of the Library Research Support team receiving their award on stage.

Across the UK, 30 other universities have since followed Edinburgh’s lead, and the library team has also presented its work in India, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The team has already saved its university more than £10,000, with hundreds of thousands in savings anticipated in the years to come and millions expected across the broader university sector.

The library team’s new Citizen Science and Participatory Research Service, meanwhile, aims to boost public trust in science while facilitating research that depends on lived experience. By providing library spaces to researchers and community groups, the service enables collaborations on research projects, while the public can also access heritage collections and other library resources. The team endeavours to connect researchers with the communities around them, helping them answer research questions of public concern.

Members of the Library Research Support team standing with the award.The judges applauded the Edinburgh library team’s initiative, commending its efforts to “share its experience with the wider sector” alongside its “emphasis on community access”. Its work, they said, “demonstrated a collaborative approach between the library research support team, academic and professional services staff, students and the local community that is scalable to other parts of the sector”.

You can read an e-book profiling all the winners.

Protocols.io Update

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Our Open Research Coordinator, Kerry Miller, has written the following update to users of the protocols.io platform at the University of Edinburgh. While this relates directly to researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the issues raised neatly highlight the challenges and barriers that open research still faces more broadly.

Edinburgh Open Research logo

On the 31st December 2024 our subscription to protocols.io will end and we have taken the difficult decision not to renew it. The reason for this is that in 2023 the company that developed protocols.io sold it to the academic publisher Springer Nature and they have decided to impose an increase in subscription cost of over 700% for 2025. Until now the subscription costs have been met from library budgets, if we continued the subscription we would need to start recouping costs directly from users and these would be somewhere in the region of £250-300 per person for 2025.

We have carefully evaluated how protocols.io is being used by staff and students and we do not feel that we can justify spending so much more for membership of this platform or that the majority of current users would be willing or able to meet the costs from their current grants. We realise that this will be disappointing and inconvenient for researchers and the Research Data Service team is here to help. If you have any questions about how this change will impact you please read the FAQ and if that does not answer all of your questions, or you would like support moving to another platform please email us using data-support@ed.ac.uk.

You can find out more on our protocols.io page https://library.ed.ac.uk/research-support/research-data-service/during/open-research-tools/protocols