Meeting Challenges in Research Data Management Planning

Presentations from the JISC Managing Research Data Programme workshop on data management planning – held on Friday 23 March – are now available.

The event page on the JISC website provides links to presentations given by projects tasked to explore the challenges of designing and implementing data management plans for research projects or for departments in specific disciplines, and to customise and implement the DCC’s DMPonline tool for specific uses.  Information about the projects can be found here and here.

David Shotton, PI of the Oxford DMPonline Project has made the content of the analysis he presented available as a couple of blog posts in which he categorises and aligns the questions that comprise a data management plan ; and then makes comparisons of DMP questions sets and draws conclusions.

At the workshop, Adrian Richardson of DCC demonstrated version 3 of the DMPonline tool and his colleague Kelly Miller ran an exercise to gather feedback and suggestions for further development. Kelly has blogged a summary of these suggestions on the DCC website.

Those with an interest in the interim outputs from the JISC-funded data management planning projects – there are more to come – may be interested in the Appendices to the Workshop Programme where outputs are listed and which may be accessed here.

A competition was held to gather participants’ opinion as to:

1) which project had produced the most reusable outputs;

2) which project had produced the most potentially significant outputs (even if they were not yet reusable); and

3) which project participants wanted to find out more after the workshop.

The winners in each category were awarded a copy of Managing Research Data, ed. Graham Pryor and were as follows:

1) Richard Plant, University of Sheffield, for the Data Management Storage and Planning for Psychology project: website ; blog.

2) Julie McLeod, University of Northumbria, for the Datum in Action: website ; blog.

3) David Shotton, for the Oxford DMPonline Project.

All the projects in this Strand of the Managing Research Data Programme are to be congratulated in their work so far.  Most of these projects will be completing between now and the end of May 2012 and will be making their final deliverables available during that timeframe.