JISC

Summary

The University of Hertfordshire conducts world leading research across several disciplines, including History, Nursing and Midwifery, Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, English, and Art and Design. Funding comes from a range of different funders, such as the Research Councils, the National Institute for Health Research and the European Union. The University sustains research of the highest calibre, which generates substantial amounts of data of many different types and scale, and significant project documentation.

The University is fully aware of the data management and sharing policies developed by a variety of research funders. We have produced our own Guide to Research Data Management, approved by the University Research Committee. Dedicated support is also provided for UH staff writing data management and data sharing plans.

Although at an institutional level our policies and procedures are in place, at an operational level the situation is that research groups across the University have a tendency to set up local arrangements for data handling and project documentation, both during the conduct of the research project, and importantly for archiving the data once the project has completed. These local arrangements include examples of good practice in research data management that can be more widely shared and will support the developments envisaged through this project.

Our need to implement a coherent and efficient institutional approach to good practice research data management represents a similar situation to that in many other institutions. This project will focus on the realisation of practical benefits for operationalising an institutional approach to good practice in research data management with strong transferable value. To this end the project will audit current best practice, develop a toolkit of services to support researchers, and deliver technology demonstrators for a number of these services.

The project will support the JISC strategy for a more dynamic and effective research environment as well as contributing to the achievement of the University's key aspirations for the quality of our research.

Objectives

This project aims to develop a service oriented toolkit to operationalise the University's data management policy and framework for an institutional approach to good practice research data management. This will build on and share existing local good practice between research groups and undertake three new pilot studies across a range of disciplines to develop and demonstrate the functional ease and flexibility of a good practice transferable toolkit for managing research data which can be utilised across the whole institution and benchmarked and packaged for use by the wider sector. 

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

The project will deliver a toolkit, which will define a number of services that can be used by researchers for good practice data and document management solutions throughout the research project lifecycle. The toolkit will include advice and guidance on:

• Data management planning
• Data management requirements of funding bodies
• Data protection and IPR
• Data storage, retrieval and sharing options that are cost-effective and offer on-demand services
• Management of project documentation
• Publication of datasets
• Data retention and archiving

In addition the project will deliver:

• Institutional implementation of the services
• Project report
• Evaluation report
• Training and Dissemination events