The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has launched its research data management programme at the ongoing UK e-Science All Hands meeting. The Managing Research Data programme seeks to help researchers, institutions, funders and policy makers meet the challenge of keeping research data for re-use in the future. A new briefing paper is also published.
Researchers in almost all disciplines now create ‘data’ in digital form. Some data are well-managed and kept so that they can be re-used in future. But the majority that go un-catalogued, are stored in an ad hoc fashion and are thus lost to posterity, resulting in a failure to reap the full potential of investment from present day research.
JISC’s Managing Research Data programme seeks to address the research data challenge from new perspectives, plugging notable gaps in current knowledge and making links between the needs of researchers, institutions and policy makers.
The programme, which ends in 2011, will provide researchers and institutions with case studies of good research data management, better tools for managing research data and training materials. Improved tools for citing, integrating and linking data, including to publications, will also be developed. Policy makers can expect to gain a clearer understanding of researchers’ and institutions’ requirements; a better view of the value of different types of data; and a roadmap outlining the steps needed to achieve a coherent UK policy for research data.
Dr. William Kilbride, director of the Digital Preservation Coalition, introduced the programme during a poster session at All Hands, encouraging participants - all of whom create research data - to think about how they can ensure that their work has a lasting impact.
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