The Director’s View: Research Data Management

On Monday 14 September, I was honoured to be asked to speak at a 1-day Workshop at the Swiss National Science Foundation in Bern, Switzerland. The theme of the Workshop was Open Data in Science, and the purpose of the meeting was to help the Science Foundation, as a research funder, determine what its policy on Open Data should be.

Data-driven research is a new paradigm in the way that research outputs and outcomes are communicated and shared. In its recent consultation on Open Science (=Open Research), the EU Commission noted that the two most important aspects of this topic are Open Access to publications and Research Data Management.

Here in UCL Library Services, we currently offer a digital curation platform for the outputs of digitisation programmes, digital cultural heritage materials and other research outputs in our Digital Collections Service. We have an Advocacy Officer, Myriam Fellous-Sigrist, who will soon be launching advocacy webpages to support researchers in managing their research data and in meeting the requirements of research funders. And the University of Sheffield has been training library colleagues over the last 12 months in the essentials of research data.

Research Data Management is an important new development in research support for academic libraries and UCL is well placed to make an important offering.

Paul Ayris

Director of UCL Library Services