Mantra Project launches online training courses for RDM

The MANTRA project has just pubished an online training course to help disseminate good practise in research data management at the University of Edinburgh and beyond.

The online training course provides guidelines for the management of research data focussing on key concepts of data management. In addition practical exercices in handling data which learners can download and work trough at their own place are provided.

The Data Library team at EDINA produced the materials over the course of the past year as part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme.

Report: Legal Status of Research Data in four european countries

It is difficult for researchers and those supporting them to understand how open access to research data can be legally obtained and re-used. This is due to the fact that European and national laws vary and researchers work across national boundaries.

A possible approach to providing clarity would be that researchers assign a licence to their data. This practice could be incorporated in a code of conduct for researchers.
The report ‘The legal status of research data in the Knowledge Exchange partner countries’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE) and written by the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER). The aim of the report was to provide clarity by analysing the intellectual property regimes in the four KE countries and European database law.

Moreover, the report provides three recommendations to achieve better access: making contractual arrangements with authors, harmonisation of European copyright law and setting up of policies on commercial interests.

You’ll find the full report here. The the four national reports are available here.

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Project “Open Data and Publications” completed

The Project had the intention to support researchers to link their datasets to their corresponding publications. The library of Tilburg University want to use the experience gained by this project to offer a standard service for researchers.
In the course of the project sixty datasets were accessed and linked to publications.

To store the data, the project chose Dataverse; because dataverse offers institutions, research groups and individual researchers a simple way of archiving data and providing access to others.

For supporting the researchers procedures and guidelines were developed.

An (at least for me) surprising lesson learned by the project was that researches in fact want to make their supplementary research material available – if they are supported by library stuff. ODE stated, that it is an important task for libraries to describe and upload the materials to make it possible that datasets are linked to their publications and can be accessed by others.

As a consequence, a designated contact person for researchers and support should be nominated at Tillburg.

A useful (and maybe the only possible) way for linking data to publications – or just another difficult task for libraries to support unwilling researchers for providing at least a little of their data?

What do you think?