Last week I attended the first meeting of the Research Data Management Forum, jointly organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the Research Information Network (RIN). The general aim of the forum is to “improve the quality, reliability, processing, management and accessibility of data of importance to science, technology and society”. The emphasis was on practical collaboration and the assembled group came from a wide variety of places including institutions, data centres and funders. The event kicked off with an opening keynote from Michael Jubb (RIN) which analysed some of the key issues and questions – what are the different types of collection? (research data, community-focussed collections, reference data for larger audiences) Who manages them? (institutions, funders, national services … ) Who uses them? (researchers, data curators, the public … ) What do we mean by data? (computational, experimental, observational … ). He also considered the importance of records management practices in relation to data and asked whether the cost of managing and disposing of data actually outweighs the cost of keeping all of it, and what that means for future usability. Issues of availability, accessibility and usability were seen as paramount. The presentation closed with an examination of notions of citation, credit and reward – Michael asked whether there is any concrete evidence of the value of storing data for re-use and sharing? There need to be real demonstrations of these benefits.
The second day was a mixture of presentation and breakout discussion. Martin Lewis (Sheffield) talked about forthcoming work on an analysis of the research data management community, and Mark Thorley (National Environment Research Council) focussed on providing appropriate skills and effort for data curation activities. I attended a breakout group on the latter where the 5 recommendations coming out of our discussions were broadly:
- understanding the data curation skills gap
- providing education at grass roots for researchers to improve data management practice from the ground-up
- raising awareness
- changing the mindset and culture of researchers by answering the question – what’s in it for me?
- considering industry drivers and government initiatives
Unfortunately I missed the recommendations from the other breakout and final summary, but overall my feeling is that the meeting was successful in bringing together interested parties and from this, generating further focus on strategies for solving the various specific issues raised.
Neil Jacobs, from JISC has also written a very useful summary: http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/03/21/the-research-data-management-forum/
