RDM Highlights from the past 12 months

To mark Love Data week here at UCL, the RDM team have published the now annual RDM review: https://doi.org/10.5522/04/19070309

Research Data Management (RDM) covers the decisions made – and actions taken – to manage research outputs across the research data lifecycle, complementing other components of open science and scholarship such as: Open Access, Bibliometrics, Research Integrity and Citizen Science.

As advocates of best practice in research data management, the RDM team have continued to promote UCL’s definition of ‘research data’ which emphasises that data refers to any output of research relevant to research findings and that publishing software, models, protocols, figures etc. is equally as important as publishing data.

In 2021, we reviewed a record-breaking number of data management and sharing plans; plus, we are publishing more research outputs than ever using the UCL Research Data Repository which recorded over 97000 downloads. We also continued to provide training via Moodle with almost 300 people completing writing a data management plan to date. 2021 also saw us become known as Library, Culture, Collection & Open Science and we as a team joined the Centre for Advanced Research Computing as associate staff.

Looking forwards to 2022, we plan on working even more closely with colleagues across UCL to enhance data management services throughout the research data lifecycle. We will also continue to advocate for changes to policy and practice relating to the way UCL rewards and assigns credit to all contributors to research to better acknowledge the vital contributions made by those especially in non-academic roles.

The full report can be found here: McMahon, Christiana; Houghton, James; Wallis, Kirsty (2022): Research Data Management: The 2021 Review. University College London. Presentation. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/19070309

Here’s to 2022!