JISC

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The 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.

Findings

The study found that usage of data centres is high: most support thousands of researchers and millions of downloads each year.

Data from every centre supports a variety of research activities, ranging from original research analysis, through combination and integration with other data, to reference purposes.

As part of a wider body of work, this evidence will help to build a case for improving data sharing practice in the UK.

Benefits

The report identified a number of benefits provided by data centres:

• Data centres contribute to research efficiency by making it quicker, easier and cheaper to access research data.
• Data centres contribute to improving the quality of data underpinning research and this improves the quality of research.
• Researchers believe that data centres have improved the culture of data sharing.
• Researchers particularly value the additional services provided by data centres, including user support and assistance, providing access to otherwise-unavailable datasets, data cleaning and presentation.

Conclusions and strategic implications

The study concludes that data centres play an important part in the modern research infrastructure, in a number of academic fields. They offer many benefits to researchers and their work, and in some cases this work itself offers benefits to wider society and the economy. Researchers believe that many of these benefits emerge because data centres are large, centralised, and offer a range of services beyond the provision of access to data.

The findings suggest that:

1. Data centres are a success story for their users, and funders and policy-makers should continue to support and promote existing national data centres.
2. Data centres are important both for reference purposes, and for novel research. Both these uses should be maintained and encouraged.
3. Data centre staff manipulate, interpret and support use of data sets, and this is highly valued by researchers. The role of data centre staff should be supported, and perhaps investigated further to support advocacy for data centre services.
4. Data centres should continue to collect information about users and usage for planning and advocacy purposes.
5. Although deposit levels are promising, researchers need more encouragement to deposit data. National and international initiatives in this area should be monitored and factored into any consideration of how to improve deposit rates.
6. If data centres are to support the grand challenges of modern research, they need to do more to facilitate interdisciplinary working. Improving facilities for data discovery across data centres may help.
7. The national data centres are just one part of a broader landscape for data curation and storage. Further work needs to be done to investigate how they can work most effectively with local, national and international services.

The report was jointly commissioned with RIN, and the core research was performed by Technopolis Ltd.