JISCMRD Programme Stage Two Launch Workshop, 22 October 2010

On 22 October a workshop was held to launch the two new strands of the JISCMRD Programme. Over sixty participants attended from new and existing projects.

The two new strands comprise:

1) Projects demonstrating the benefits of making research data openly available by exploring ways of citing, linking, integrating and publishing that data.

2) Projects creating research data management training materials.

The objectives of the day were to provide the new projects with an opportunity to discuss their objectives and establish points of contact with other new and with existing projects; to capture commonalities, potential for collaboration and issues for deeper consideration; and to consider actionable support activities, workshops, seminars at the Programme, JISC or community level.

Most of the presentations given are now available on the Workshop page.

Feedback on the event, I’m pleased to say, has been very positive, and most participants welcomed the chance to find out what other projects are doing and make practical links for collaboration which may, in due course, save time and avoid duplication. A strong and consistent theme in the feedback, however, was that more time should have been allocated to discussion and for the extremely useful and underrated unstructured discussions of coffee breaks etc. This has all been duly noted!

Although clearly too short, the discussion groups were VERY successful and have given rise to at set of working groups tackling an assortment of shared challenges across the projects.

The areas for ongoing collaboration are:

Metadata for Datasets: Identifiers and Ontologies #MRDonto

Data Integration #MRDinteg

Open Data Publishers Working Group #MRDpub

IPR and Licensing #MRDipr

Training Strand #MRDtrain

These will be the subject of my next few posts…