New release of Research Data MANTRA (Management Training)

The Research Data MANTRA course is an open, online training course that provides instruction in good practice in research data management. There are eight interactive learning units on key topics such as data management planning, organising and formatting data, using shared data and licensing your own data, as well as four data handling tutorials with open datasets for use in R, SPSS, NVivo and ArcGIS.
This fourth release of MANTRA has been revised and systematically updated with new content, videos, reading lists, and interactive quizzes. Three of the data handling tutorials have been rewritten and tested for newer software versions too. Read the rest of this entry »

Project DaMaRO at University of Oxford

DaMaRO (Data Management Rollout at Oxford) is a collaborative project between several departments within the university: Oxford University Computing Services, the Bodleian Libraries, and Research Services. It is funded by JISC and will run until March 2013.

The aim of the project is creating a research data management policy for the University and the infrastructure to enable researchers to comply with it.

DaMaRO will take the outputs of the various research data management project that the University has been engaged in over the last few years and combines them into a better-integrated suite of tools and discovery mechanisms that will support researchers throughout the data life-cycle, from planning to re-use.

Of particular note is the ‘DataFinder’ tool that DaMaRO will be developing. This will enable the discovery of data hosted in various places around the University and beyond.

Behind the scenes, DataFinder will be able to automatically gather metadata from each of the tools and repositories it connects to, assign DOIs where they are not already assigned, and ensure that the metadata complies with the national DataCite standards. Furthermore, DataFinder will make the metadata it gathers available as linked data, and also map it to the CERIF standard, so that alerts can be issued to compatible research management systems when new project outputs are made available.

Beside software development, the DaMaRO Project will develop data management trainings and documentations for researchers.

Data centres: their use, value and impact

This report provides an analysis of the usage and impact of a number of research data centres, representing a cross-section of research disciplines in the UK.

The study aimed to demonstrate the importance, relevance and benefits of effective sharing and curation of research data for the UK research community. It looked at the long-term usage and impact of data curated by a cross-disciplinary selection of established data centres.

Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, the study gathered evidence on the extent data centres have been useful to the research community. As part of a wider body of work, this evidence will help to build a case for improving data sharing practice in the UK.

The full report is available at the RIN website or here.

Read the rest of this entry »