The Research Data Management Forum
This week I went to an early meeting of the Research Data Management Forum, co-sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre and the Research Information Network. The management and curation of research data is both a hot topic and a major challenge – not always a happy combination. This meeting of the Forum was open to anyone, and a diverse group attended, including several directly involved in managing research data and several more, like me, who have an interest supporting that work. In many ways the challenge of managing the digital data deluge is beyond the capacity of a single forum, and at times the list of unanswered questions prompted by the discussion threatened to sink the enthusiasm of even the keenest curator. There seems to be so much that needs doing. However, the main message I took away was the urgent need for more and better evidence: What are the benefits of curating and sharing research data? What are the benefits of having people in UK higher education skilled in data management? To whom do these benefits accrue? The evidence may be of a variety of kinds. Certainly, case studies can help show where these benefits arise and to whom in particular cases. However, what’s also needed is some serious economic modelling of the kind recently deployed by Professors Newbery and Bently and Rufus Pollock in their recent report on ‘Models of Public Sector Information Provision’ and, in a different context, by John Houghton and his colleagues on ‘Research Communication Costs in Australia’.
To supplement this message, and assuming the evidence shows that data curation and sharing is beneficial to UK higher education, to the UK more widely, and to research in general, the question arises what’s in it for researchers? In many disciplines data sharing is not common, and this can be for good reasons. The forthcoming report on ‘data publication’, commissioned by the Research Information Network, Natural Environment Research Council and JISC, will document the picture in some detail. A missing piece in the puzzle is the full citation of specific datasets, which is uncommon. Should this become common, metrics could be derived from aggregated citations to indicate the extent to which datasets were referenced, and academic credit (and therefore incentive) could follow. The difficulty is less in principle (for example, datasets from the UK Data Archive should already be cited whenever used, and can be easily) but in practice; it just rarely happens. JISC is funding several projects that might help – CLADDIER, StoreLink and OJIMS are the most obvious examples, but it’s not necessarily something that a JISC project alone can address.
Posted by: Neil Jacobs
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[…] Neil Jacobs, from JISC has also written a very useful summary: http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/03/21/the-research-data-management-forum/ […]