JISC

Nearly 200 delegates gathered in London last week to debate how to capture and manage the UK's rich data resources for future use. Their focus was the findings of the eagerly anticipated feasibility study into a UK Research Data Service (UKRDS), a study funded under the HEFCE shared services programme with additional funding from JISC, Research Libraries UK and the Russell Universities Group IT directors.

The study recommends that there is a need for a UKRDS, based on a ‘cooperative service model’, that would build on existing good practice in data management and fill gaps in provision. More than 700 researchers at four case study universities had been interviewed as part of the investigations.

'The UK is already well provided with an infrastructure on which to build', Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of IT Services at the London School of Economics and chair of the UKRDS project board, told the conference. This includes several subject-specific national data centres and many JISC initiatives, such as the JANET network, the Information Environment, the Digital Curation Centre and tools developed under the Data Audit Framework projects.

Institutional repositories could fill gaps left by the lack of suitable subject repositories, Dr Malcolm Read, JISC executive secretary, told the conference. 'If we can’t create subject repositories in all disciplines, we need a horizontal vision across institutional and disciplinary repositories.' This should include subject practitioner advice on what to save and how.

Read also drew attention to several outstanding and urgent policy issues including:

• who owns the data
• how much should be saved
• assurance that repositories can ‘talk to each other’; and
• building a data management profession

The volume of research data more than doubles annually. How can we manage this rich resource for future use?Most of the subject-specific data centres were established by researchers in response to a research need, the conference heard. Examples include protein and genome databases maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute and environmental data centres managed by the Natural Environment Research Council. The initiative behind the UKRDS study, however, came largely from the library and information communities.

'Some libraries are coming under pressure from their researchers to store research data,' said Sykes. However, 'storage isn’t the only thing. It’s the way you manage data from start to finish.' Well-managed and accessible data are available for future researchers to conduct new studies, minimising duplication of effort and maximising the gain from UK research investment.

The meeting also heard that:

• researchers are often not good at managing data beyond the lifetime of a funded project
• generally, data is never fully analysed by the researchers who generate it
• most data is stored locally if no national or international facility is available
• 88% of researchers already share data, even if only with collaborators or through informal peer exchange networks
• 43% of researchers say they would like to access others’ data

Research Libraries UK
Russell Universities Group of IT Directors (RUGIT)
UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) Feasibility study