National approaches to
data management
Sarah Jones
Digital Curation Centre, Glasgow
sarah.jones@glasgow.ac.uk
Twitter: @sjDCC
RDA Ireland, 8th September 2017, Dublin

What needs to be addressed?
Image CC-BY-NC-SA by Leo Reynolds www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/13442910354

Components of RDM services
www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/how-develop-rdm-services

UK Open Data Concordat
• Multi-stakeholder group: RCUK, HEFCE, Universities
UK, Wellcome Trust
• Developed in response to criticism about varying
policy requirements
• Provides a set of principles and roles for all
www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/
concordatonopenresearchdata-pdf

DMPTuuli for DMPs
https://www.dmptuuli.fi
• Project supported by the Ministry of
Education
• Single national service that all unis
can customise
• Developed national DMP template
• Liaison / piloting with Academy of
Finland and other research funders

Secure data services
TSD provides a platform for researchers working at
University of Oslo and in other public research
institutions to collect, store and analyze sensitive
research data. TSD complies with the directive of
privacy and electronic communication in Norway.
www.uio.no/english/services/it/research/
storage/sensitive-data/index.html

Dutch DataVerse network
• A network of data repositories
• Based on open source repository solution
• Supported by participating institutions and DANS
• Provides storage, sharing and registration of data,
during the research period and up to prescribed
term of ten years after its completion.
https://dataverse.nl

National / domain repositories
CESSDA social science
data centres
BioSharing portal of
databases in life sciences
www.cessda.eu https://biosharing.org

Research Data Australia
https://researchdata.ands.org.au
• National portal to
Australian research data
• Harvests metadata from
100+ research orgs,
government agencies,
and cultural institutions
• Funded projects within
institutions to ‘seed the
commons’

MANTRA online training
http://mantra.edina.ac.uk
• Online toolkit, created with
international reuse in mind
• CC-BY licensed to permit
widest reuse
• Lots of uptake: embed in
VLE, inspire new variants,
led to MOOC…

Guidance resources

What do we learn from these examples?
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by talkingplant www.flickr.com/photos/talkingplant/2256485110Image CC-0 by Alan Levine https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15903347764

Lots of potential to get started
• Many services can be offered at a national level
• It helps to build on good practice emerging from
universities or other countries
• Understand community needs and priorities
• Tackle one aspect at a time

Research Data Shared Service vision
www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/research-data-shared-service
• Provide an end-to-end system, offered as a managed service
• Procure services on behalf of the sector

Will always be a hybrid environment
Local  National   Global
NIH
Commons
EOSC
African Open
Science Platform
National
Data
Services
Diverse mix of stakeholders acting at different levels
Universities
Discipline-specific, community-based services
Third-party
service providers
Registration agencies

Coordinate across the levels
Dutch front-office back-office concept from DANS

Critical to provide fora to exchange ideas
DCC’s Research Data Management Forum (RDMF)
• Informal network with bi-annual events since 2008
• Topics based on current issues raised by members
• Overnight stays to promote networking opportunities
• Model replicated in Portugal
www.dcc.ac.uk/events/research-
data-management-forum-rdmf

Dutch National RDM Coordination Point
• Formal coordination to facilitate national strategy
• Five issues / working groups
• Members from unis, UMCs, unis of applied sciences,
data centres, national services and other institutes
• Coordinated by SURF with other agencies
www.surf.nl/en/lcrdm
Potential role for
national RDA
group?

Lots of ways to get started
Image ‘Go !!’ CC-BY-NC-ND by Cédric Fettouche www.flickr.com/photos/cedmars/5405223203

National projects
• DLCM (Swiss Data Lifecycle Management) funded by
swissuniversities to combine existing efforts on RDM
• Five project tracks:
1. Guidelines, polices and Data Management Plan
2. Publication and preservation
3. Active data management
4. Consultation and training
5. Outreach and dissemination
• Similar projects elsewhere to coordinate RDM e.g. e-
Infrastructures Austria and Tuuli project in Finland
www.dlcm.ch

Establish centres of expertise
Australian National Data
Centre (ANDS)
“to make Australia’s research
data assets more valuable for
researchers, research
institutions and the nation”
www.ands.org.au

Funding programmes e.g. MRD
The Jisc Managing Research Data programmes were instrumental in
seeding RDM activity in a wide range of unis and building community
MRD 01: October 2009 – July 2011
• £4.3 million investment
• Strands: infrastructure projects, DMPs, citation, training, tools (costs & reqs)
• www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx
MRD 02 – October 2011 – July 2013
• £4.6 million investment
• Strands: infrastructure projects, DMPs, training, data publication
• www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managin
gresearchdata.aspx
Lots of workshops and coordination by DCC & Jisc throughout

Membership organisations
Canadian Portage network
• Launched in 2015 by the Canadian Association of Research
Libraries (CARL)
• Supported by Library memberships for 2 years (business plan)
• Aim is to coordinate and expand existing expertise, services,
and infrastructure for RDM
• Collaborate with other relevant national groups e.g. Compute
Canada, RDC, Canadian Association of Research Admins
(CARA) & Ethics Boards (CAREB)
https://portagenetwork.ca

Questions
• Do you have all the stakeholders at the table?
• What resources do you have to commit?
• Where are things at now?
• Which are the most pressing priorities?
• What does it make most sense to centralise?
• What should be provided, by whom, at what level?

Thanks for listening
For DCC resources see:
www.dcc.ac.uk/resources
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