The poster gives an overview of the major strands of work in the Research360 project (Roadmap & Business Case, RDM Policy & Policy Guidelines, RDM Website & Researcher Support, RDM Training Workshops). It describes the outcomes in each area, along with the continuing work which will support and further develop these outcomes going forward.

• Download the poster

On Monday morning, we ran a workshop, jointly with Hannah Lloyd-Jones from Open Exeter, entitled “Designing Data Management Training Resources: Tools for the provision of interactive research data management workshops“. This offered participants the opportunity to learn more about the way we run our face-to-face data management training with staff and students, and to experience first-hand some of the interactive exercises we use.

These included Open Exeter’s “Research Data Dating” exercise, in which two concentric circles of participants have 3 minutes to describe their research data to each other before moving on to the next person. I demonstrated how we use “clickers” (audience response systems) to survey our students during face-to-face workshops, and we also had a discussion of the pros and cons of the data management plan (DMP) templates that we’ve used with students.

For more info, take a look at Marieke Guy’s blog post, IDCC13: Exemplar RDM Training Exercises and Jill Evans’s summary of tweets from the workshop. For those who are interested, we used PollEverywhere, a website which permits voting on questions via SMS or the web on a smartphone or laptop.

Update: You can now download Hannah’s slides: Designing Data Management Training Resources: IDCC 2013 Workshop

Cathy Pink presented a practice paper entitled “Meeting the Data Management Compliance Challenge: Funder Expectations and Institutional Reality“. The paper drew together lessons learnt by the Research360 project, based on its experience in meeting the varied data management needs of both an institution and its external stakeholders. The text of Cathy’s paper will be available online soon.

Liz Lyon facilitated the “What is a data scientist?” symposium, an interactive panel discussion around roles and skills required to cope with the growing importance of data in scholarship. See Marieke’s blog post, “IDCC13: What’s in a name? The ‘data scientist’ symposium” for more details.

Finally, we also presented a poster, “Creating an Online Training Module on RDM“, about the process of developing our research data management e-learning module for postgraduate students. The poster was designed and written by our colleague Marieke Guy from UKOLN, and I gave a “minute madness” presentation summarising it as well.

There is also a searchable archive of tweets with the #idcc13 hashtag.

Our slides and poster from the progress workshop are now available through our institutional repository:

• Presentation — RDM Training for Students and Staff: Progress & Observations (Jez Cope)
• Presentation — University of Bath Roadmap for EPSRC (Cathy Pink)
• Poster — Research360 Progress Update (Jez Cope & Cathy Pink)

Responsibility for responding to the EPSRC’s expectations – the roadmap setting out how compliance would be achieved – lay with the University’s Research Data Steering Group (RDSG), a work group set up in January 2011 to advise on Research Data Management (RDM) across the institution. There is considerable overlap between members of the RDSG and the Research360 project team and as such, the Roadmap for EPSRC was developed alongside Research360 project work on a longer term RDM strategy.

We are now able to share the University of Bath Roadmap for EPSRC: Compliance with Research Data Management Expectations. We also wish to share the process that we went through to develop and obtain approval for our Roadmap, positive feedback that we have received and to tell you what we intend to do next.

How the Roadmap was developed

As part of the Research360 project we used Monash University’s “Research Data Management Strategy and Strategic Plan 2012-2015″ as a blueprint, from which we developed our own draft strategy and implementation plan. This original strategy consisted of a series of objectives and activities aligned with a number of themes, which in turn demonstrated how management of research data contributes to existing, long term University strategies.

We then turned our attention to the EPSRC’s nine expectations. Following a helpful series of blog posts by the DCC, and based on our experiences over the first few months of Research360, we started by identifying what the University of Bath is already doing to meet the expectations. We then re-structured the proposed objectives and activities from our draft strategy so that they were aligned with the EPSRC’s expectations.

Importantly, this approach meant that whilst fulfilling the requirements of the EPSRC, our proposed activities were primarily focused on building a sustainable infrastructure that will meet the data management needs of the University.

Getting the Roadmap approved

Once approved by the RDSG, we sent the Roadmap for EPSRC to the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (PVC) for Research. Working with the PVC Research was critical to the successful development of the Roadmap and we are extremely grateful for Professor Millar’s support. The PVC Research oversees the RDSG and is Chair of the Research360 Steering Group. As such, she already had a strong awareness of Research Data Management activities at Bath, and was able to provide invaluable guidance and a viewpoint from senior management from within the institution.

In order to meet the EPSRC’s 1^st May 2012 deadline, we did not have time to progress the Roadmap through the normal approval process. We therefore submitted the Roadmap directly to the Vice-Chancellor’s Group (VCG). Despite positive comments from the VCG, they were not able to approve the first draft of the Roadmap. This provided us with an opportunity to incorporate their comments – mainly that we had been a little too ambitious in our aims and deadlines – before a resubmission of the Roadmap at the following VCG meeting, where the Roadmap was finally approved.

Submission to EPSRC and encouraging feedback

The University of Bath Roadmap for EPSRC: Compliance with Research Data Management Expectations was submitted by the Vice-Chancellor to EPSRC on 1^st May 2012. We have since received some extremely encouraging feedback: Ben Ryan, Senior Evaluation Manager, EPSRC, congratulated Bath on the document, and described it as “an excellent example of an appropriate response”. He stated that the Roadmap “fully meets our needs for assurance that the University is taking our policy framework on research data seriously”. Further comments from Ben Ryan; from Professor Millar, the PVC Research; and Dr Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and one of the Roadmap’s authors, can be read in a news item about our Roadmap for EPSRC on the University of Bath website.

Building on the Roadmap – what we will do next

Following approval by the VCG, we have been able to present the Roadmap at a number of other relevant committees, to all major stakeholders and to those who will share responsibility for implementing the Roadmap. Over the next few months, we will be working closely with these stakeholders to explain RDM and its benefits in more detail, and to address any concerns that have been raised about the challenging cultural changes that lie ahead.

Now that the RDSG’s Roadmap for EPSRC has been approved, Research360 will continue to work on the developing the long term institutional RDM Strategy. The activities and objectives in the Roadmap for EPSRC will form the basis of a dynamic RDM Operational Plan, which will accompany the RDM Strategy as a Research360 project deliverable. We will also continue to work on the supporting Institutional RDM Business Case. These three documents will then undergo a longer review and approval process, starting to progress through the relevant committees in the autumn.

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In trying to identify the three key benefits of the Research360 project (as against RDM more generally) I have used the KRDS benefits framework as a guide to determine what the outcome of the benefit will be, when it will be achieved and who will benefit.

1. Centralised provision of RDM support for researchers

Central to research data management are the researchers themselves and it’s easy to forget that all researchers already manage their data. What we’re asking them to do is to continue to manage their data, but in a more structured way and for longer than they might be used to.

In order to do this, researchers need to understand what is meant by RDM and what their responsibilities are – to themselves, to their students, to their funders and to their Institution. They then need to be able to find and access the support available to enable them achieve this.

Researchers will benefit most if this information is clearly visible and usable. We have therefore created and are continuing to develop a research data management website at the University of Bath. This website will host many of the outputs from Research360: our new RDM policy; guidelines in data management planning and storage; information about training and support; and links to other resources.

Production of this focal RDM resource will be a direct benefit primarily aimed at researchers internal to the University of Bath. However, it will also showcase our commitment to RDM to our external collaborators and act as a resource to other institutions and to the wider RDM community.

In the near term, we will monitor traffic to the website, use of the resources hosted there and requests for RDM support. We would also hope to see increased use of the existing managed storage facilities and uptake of data management planning as part of all funding applications.

Over the longer term, the resources hosted on this website will support a cultural change across the institution leading to a fully integrated RDM environment at the institution.

2. Strengthening of industrial ties

A key feature of both the Research360 project and research carried out at Bath is the focus on collaborative research, both interdisciplinary research and in collaboration with external organisations.

How then, might collaborative research benefit from effective research data management? In collaboration with colleagues working on the REDm-MED project and Neil Beagrie (of Charles Beagrie Ltd) we have recently been giving this question a lot of consideration.

Whilst there was general agreement that effective data management is a ‘good thing’ for collaborative research, identifying how this would translate to specific benefits for both industry and the institution has been difficult. Harder still is working out how any benefits could be measured.

As part of Research360, we therefore want to learn more about how data generated through such collaborations is currently organised, accessed, curated and preserved. We can then identify particular difficulties that managing such data can generate and identify what can be done to overcome these problems in the future, thus generating both direct and indirect benefits.

We therefore aim to identify representative case studies of research carried out in partnership with industry. By working closely with individual researchers, we can identify, target and resolve specific problems in the near term. This should then enable us to determine how our work on RDM is supporting and benefiting collaborative research over the longer term.

3. Creating a sustainable RDM infrastructure at the University of Bath

Achieving a fully integrated research data management infrastructure, particularly the technical and training aspects, is likely to take longer than the duration of the Research360 project. We therefore need to ensure that the work completed during the project is both maintained and built on once the project finishes.

We will therefore build on the outputs of the Community Capability Model Framework project to produce a clear institutional roadmap and supporting business case. These will provide the framework around which this longer term sustainable development will occur. They will also identify where further investment and work are required and define where responsibility for this work will lie.

This will benefit the institution in its strategic longer term planning. Researchers will benefit from a continued RDM infrastructure and from retention of investment from both funders and external collaborators. The wider RDM community will benefit from continued investment and development of RDM.

We won’t be able to directly measure the benefits of the institutional roadmap and business case until after they are delivered at the end of the project. However, by then we should have an idea about what the future plans are for RDM at the University of Bath.

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On Thursday 2 February 2012, we got together for a project team meeting, so leading on from that, here’s a brief progress report:

• As we’re starting to get a number of requests for help specifically related to research data management, we agreed to set up a queue on RT (Request Tracker, our support ticket tracking system) to deal with these; this will give users a single point of contact and allow us to measure the volume and type of incoming queries and our capacity to deal with them;
• The university’s data management web page has been updated and tweaked to provide a more useful experience until we have fully redeveloped that area of the website;
• Project start up (Work Package 1) is now complete;
• We are currently recruiting participants for a CARDIO survey to assess perceptions of our current data management infrastructure and capacity; it’s likely we’ll be following this up by interviewing selected respondents; (WP2 Requirements analysis)
• Work has begun on our Roadmap for submission to EPSRC; (WP3.1 Implementation plan/roadmap)
• Neil Beagrie is making good progress with interviewing stakeholders for the business case; (WP3.2 Sustainability and business model)
• We will be running a hybrid training session and focus group on data management planning (DMP) with second-year DTC students in mid February; we are also planning how we can get feedback on DMPonline from students in the Centre for Digital Entertainment, given that they are based out in industry with their placement partners; (WP3.3 Data management planning/WP6 Liaison, training & advocacy)
• A rough draft of our high-level data management policy has been produced and is now in the process of being refined; Cathy Pink will be attending the forthcoming workshop on policy development; (WP4 Policy development)
• We are getting closer to appointing the systems developer who will help us develop and pilot an interface between our VRE, iSusLab, and a pilot repository via SWORD2; in the meantime, we will be making progress by planning how we will pilot Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs); (WP5.2 Research workflow & data deposit)
• Work has begun on our data storage guidelines; (WP5.3 Data storage guidelines)
• After a very valuable meeting in January, at which we learned more about CERIF and Pure (the Current Research Information System currently being implemented at Bath), we’ve clarified Deliverable 5.4 — more on this to follow.