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Research at Risk Research Data Discovery Service Research Data Management Businesss Case Research data metrics

Research at risk: spring progress update 2017

Research at Risk

Over the past year, a remarkable range of events have taken place. Anything from the launch of the Concordat on Open Research Data, to the royal assent of the Higher Education and Research Bill most recently.  In the meantime, we have been making strides on the Jisc research futures projects, both – the ones from the first co-design challenge (a.k.a research at risk), as well as the latest two projects from the second co-design challenge. You might have seen updates on the latter in recent blog posts by Caroline Ingram.

For the 7 ongoing research at risk projects, we put together an all-inclusive list of summaries and updates to give you a better overview on our progress and also to help clarify how the projects align and work together.

If you are looking for a short summary, here it is:

Research Data Shared Service

  • A set of minimum requirements have been defined for the service; these will be built into the service in two phases – alpha until July 2017, and beta until April 2018
  • Currently in its alpha phase, the project has already delivered the first three repository installs at Middlesex, Surrey and SGUL
  • We’ve set up the University of Jisc testing space and are populating it with data and research systems both from the framework and external
  • The canonical data model is out for consultation with pilots and experts
  • We installed preservation systems from Arkivum/Artefactual and Preservica and also worked with the Open Preservation Foundation on assessing file formats
  • Pilots are meeting regularly, i.e. every quarter
  • For more information, check out these FAQs.

Research Data Discovery Service

  • A further 9 HEIs and 2 organisations volunteered to participate in phase 3; the aim is also to include all the pilot institutions from the research data shared service
  • The first webinar for phase 3 was held last month, and you can find the report and slides on the project blog
  • The service has been undergoing quite a bit of technical upgrades, and you can already find these in the  beta version; all metadata is currently being re-harvested in this new version
  • For more information, and to keep up to date, you can either check the project blog, or sign up to the mailing list (JISC-UKRDDS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK).

Research Data Metrics for Usage

  • IRUS for data is in beta and the test instance (available on request) covers 25 repositories across 23 institutions and is compatible with all major data repository solutions (except Converis)
  • We will be piloting soon a new user interface for IRUS for data
  • Work on COUNTER for data is continuing throughout the whole of 2017
  • Research data citation component will be part of a more comprehensive project covering citation metrics more generally, which will be launched this summer
  • Further information and updates are available on the project blog.

Journal Research Data Policy Bank

  • We are working with major publishers to support an improvement in the quality and readability of journal data policies via the Data Citation Implementation Pilot Publishers Early Adopters Group at FORCE11, and the development of a Research Data Alliance Interest Group on the topic, of which Jisc are co-chairs alongside Springer Nature, the Australian National Data Service and Wiley.
  • It is intended that the Interest Group will meet again at the next RDA plenary in Montreal, before which point we would put more detailed proposals together for discussion
  • For more information, check the project blog.

Research Data Spring

  • This initiative has ended.
  • We are continuing to work with a number of the tools that have gone through the final phase to support them with further development or integration within the research data shared service.
  • For more information, check the main page of the project.

Research Data Business Case and Costing

  • The high-level business case for research data management has now been published on the research data network site along with accompanying case studies and video presentations
  • We’ve produced a framework that we will use to develop additional costing tools, methodologies and possibly services; we will test this framework with the research data shared service pilots and publish the results
  • For more information, check the research data network site.

Equipment and asset sharing

  • Equipment.data.ac.uk has been transferred to Jisc from the University of Southampton
  • The number of contributors increased from 43 to 51 higher education and research institutes
  • We are working with 5+ booking systems to understand options for integration
  • We are also working with the regional groups to understand their needs and what we can help with
  • Further info and updates on the blog.

Research Data Network

Other than these projects, we carried out 3 successful research data network events, and are working to maintain the research data network site with contributions and resources shared by you. So thank you very much for all your help, support and enthusiastic involvevement with research data network and all the Jisc projects.

The fourth research data network event will be taking place at York University. The programme 1 keynote, 7 plenaries, 16 sessions, 12 demos, lightning talks, Queen Bee. More than 150 signed up for the event, but there is still space, so do register asap.