The Director’s View: LEARN Workshop no. 2

LEaders Activating Research Networks

LEARN is an EU-funded project, led by UCL Library Services, which aims to prepare researchers, research organisations and funders for the data deluge. In new emerging research paradigms, the research data which underpins the research publication can be made available alongside the publication itself (e.g. journal article, book).

The 2nd LEARN Workshop was held in the University of Vienna on 7 April (Stephansdom, Vienna, left). There were just under 50 attenders from a number of countries – Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy and Switzerland. The morning session was given over to keynote presentations, setting the scene. I gave one on the importance of research data management and the ambitions of the LEARN project.

The afternoon sessions were devoted to Breakout Groups, where all the attenders were asked to contribute their views on a number of issues. I chaired the session on policy development. Compared to the UK, it was interesting to discover that most research organisations in central and eastern Europe did not have research data management policies. UCL’s is here.

The Workshop was very useful in identifying a number of themes and approaches, which will be reflected in the Toolkit of Good Practice which the project is developing. One obvious area is on policy development, and the routes that institutions have taken in establishing research data management policies. Another lesson learned from the Vienna meeting is that the project outputs, principally the template Research Data Management policy and the Toolkit of Best Practice, need to reflect the actual needs of research organisations and where they are in instituting research data management practices and infrastructures. These will differ institution by institution and the project needs to be aware of this.

The 3rd LEARN Workshop is at the LIBER Conference in Helsinki in the Summer.

Paul Ayris

Director of UCL Library Services