Article written by Dr Christiana McMahon, UCL Research Data Management Team

As we discussed in the blog post on Wednesday, there are ways to share and be transparent about your research without compromising ethical or legal requirements. Did you know that the UCL Research Data Repository (RDR) is a great way for staff and research students to archive, preserve, promote and publish these outputs created as part of the research process?

Have you ever been asked to archive other types of research outputs? UCL has RPS for articles, but did you know that you can also archive and share other outputs of research? Be it a whole dataset, or other types of material supporting your research such as photos, models, software, presentation slides, your Data Management Plan, even a poster.

By using the RDR, you can get a permanent identifier for your work in the form of a DOI and add it to your ORCID. Additionally, as you publish items in the UCL Research Data Repository, these are automatically collated together on a data repository webpage just for you.

With over 580,000 downloads globally, we have published over 950 research outputs that have been viewed in over 180 countries, so start publishing today!

• For more information contact: researchdatarepository@ucl.ac.uk.
• Access the full online catalogue: https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/

Article written by Dr Christiana McMahon, UCL Research Data Management Team

Writing a data management plan can be difficult task to approach at the best of times. There are lots of things to consider, not just going through your project in detail, you may also need to consider external funding agency requirements, UCL’s research data expectations plus the FAIR data principles, well… advice from the Research Data Support Officers might be just what you need!

There is still plenty of time to get registered for one of the upcoming courses on how to write a data management plan! Book your place online today.

Data management plans (DMPs) describe your data management and sharing activities across the research data lifecycle and are a valuable document for you to refer to throughout your research project that can help you structure and protect your data for the long term. A fully completed DMP is usually 1-3 pages in length and can even be published as an output of your research. We recommend that they are written at the start of the research and are regularly reviewed and updated over the course of your research.

For more information on data management planning and how to get in touch with the team, visit our website.

Article written by Dr Christiana McMahon, UCL Research Data Management Team

“I want to share my data, but I can’t because…” is something we hear often.

Sometimes, it’s not possible to share evidence openly and that’s okay. Let’s take a closer look at what we can do to promote research findings and foster transparency and confidence in the research process

At UCL, staff and students are actively encouraged to share their research outputs openly with the wider academic and public communities. However, openly sharing the research evidence which underpins published findings might not always be possible as there could be ethical, legal or commercial reasons prohibiting you from doing so. Hence the phrase, “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.

While you may not be able to share your data as an output, there are many other considerations. Can you be transparent about your processes? Can you tell others how you did the research so that they can replicate your methods? Have you considered ways to anonymise or share derived subsets of your data? What about your publications associated with your research, can they be open?

There are a huge amount of options available to you. Check out the Office for Open Science and Scholarship website for advice and support on engaging with open research principles even when the research evidence cannot be made publicly accessible.

Plus, easily access different teams across UCL helping you to engage with open research:

• Open Access,
• Research Data Management,
• UCL Press,
• Metrics and Bibliometrics,
• Transparency and Reproducibility,
• Digital Collections,
• Citizen Science,
• Co-Production and Public Engagement,
• Compliance and Assurance,
• and Copyright.

Guest post by Preeti Matharu, Jack Hindley, Victor Olago, Angharad Green (ARC Research Data Stewards), in celebration of International Love Data Week 2025

Research data is a valuable yet vulnerable asset. Research data is a valuable yet vulnerable asset. Researchers collect and analyse large amounts of personal and sensitive data ranging from health records to survey responses, and this raises an important question – whose data is it anyway?

If data involve human subjects, then participants are the original owners of their personal data. They grant permission to researchers to collect and use their data through informed consent. Therefore, responsibility for managing and protecting their data, in line with legal, regulatory, ethical requirements, and policies lie with researchers and their institution. Hence, maintaining a balance between participant rights and researcher needs.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the UK and EU, participants have the right to access, update and request deletion of their data, whilst researchers must comply with the law to ensure research integrity. However, under the Data Protection Act, research data processed in the public interest must be retained irrespective of participant rights, including the rights to erase, access and rectify. UCL must uphold this requirement while ensuring participant confidentiality is not compromised.

Information governance consists of policies, procedures and processes adopted by UCL to ensure research data is managed securely and complies with legal and operational requirements.

Support for information governance in research is now provided by Data Stewards within ARC RDM IG. That’s a long acronym, let’s break it down.

• ARC: Advanced Research Computing – UCL’s research innovative centre and provides 1. Secure digital infrastructure and 2. Teaching software.
• RDM: Research Data Management – assist researchers with data management.
• IG: Information governance – advise researchers on compliance for managing sensitive data.

Data Stewards – we support researchers with data management throughout the research study, provide guidance on data security awareness training, data security requirements for projects, and compliance with legal and regulatory standards, encompassing the Five Safes Framework principles. Additionally, we advise on sensitive data storage options, such as a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) or the Data Safe Haven (DSH).

Furthermore, we emphasise the importance of maintaining up-to-date and relevant documentation and provide guidance on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles.

As stated above, data can be vulnerable. UCL must implement strong security controls including encryption, access control and authentication, to protect sensitive data, such as personal health data and intellectual property. Sensitive data refers to data whose unauthorised disclosure could cause potential harm to participants or UCL.

UCL’s Information Security Management System (ISMS) is a systematic approach to managing sensitive research data to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability. It is a risk management process involving people, processes and IT systems. The key components include information management policy, identifying and assessing risks, implementing security controls to mitigate identified risks, training users and continuous monitoring. The ISMS is crucial in research:

1. It protects sensitive data; without stringent security measures, data is at risk of being accessed by unauthorised individuals leading to potential theft.
2. It ensures legal and regulatory compliance i.e. GDPR and UCL policies. Non-compliance results in hefty fines, legal action and reputational damage.
3. Research ethics demand participant data is handled with confidentiality. The ISMS ensures data management practices, data anonymisation, and controlled access whilst reinforcing ethical responsibility.
4. It reduces the risk of phishing attacks and ransomware.
5. It ensures data integrity and reliability – tampered or corrupted data can lead to invalid research and waste of resources.

UCL practices for Information Governance in research:

• Data security – Use encrypted storage, access controls and secure platforms like TRE or DSH.
• Ethical responsibility – Data protection office and Ethics obtain informed consent from participants and ensure they fully understand how their data will be used.
• Data Security Awareness training – Ensure researchers have completed and regularly review their training.
• Information Security Group – Conduct regular audits, identify vulnerabilities and mitigate potential risks.
• Contract Services – Review all research related contracts.

In response to the question, whose data is it anyway? Data may be generated by participants, but the overall responsibility to use, process, protect, ethically manage lies upon the researchers and UCL. Additionally, beyond compliance and good information governance, it is about ensuring research integrity and safeguarding the participants who make research possible.

In true UCL tradition, we kickstart the week with the annual Research Data Management review so take a look at our poster and see what we’ve been doing in the Library!

As part of our Open Access Week celebrations, we were delighted to host the second annual Open Science & Scholarship Awards presentation. This event gave us the opportunity to gather in person, congratulate the awardees, and celebrate their achievements after announcing the winners a few weeks ago.

The event began with certificate presentations, followed by a showcase of the award-winning projects.

First, Enny van Beest and Célian Bimbard, who received an honourable mention in the Open Source Software/Analytical Tools category, shared their project UnitMatch. Designed to track neurons across extensive Neuropixel Recordings, this software accelerates the analysis of large datasets, proving a valuable resource for researchers handling high volumes of neural data.

Next, winners of the Student category, Sophie Ka Ling Lau and Divya Balain, presented Diverse Voices, a website emerging from their project on the impact of COVID-19 on East London communities. Sophie and Divya, both Master’s students from UCL’s Departments of Brain Sciences and Life Sciences, respectively, created this collaborative platform to share insights gained from their research.

In the Advocating for Open Science & Community Building category, Joseph Cook shared his work with the UCL Citizen Science Academy, housed within the Institute for Global Prosperity. The Academy empowers citizens to participate in research projects, offering a structured learning programme and a certificate that recognises their contributions and learning.

The Professional Services Staff category award went to the Understanding Disability Project, presented by Eirini-Christina Saloniki and William Lammons. This project combines lived experiences with broad representation to document perspectives of people living with disabilities across North Thames, aiming for a comprehensive view that highlights the unique challenges they face.

Finally, in the Open Publishing category, Emily Gardner discussed her work with the NCL Mutation Database. This essential resource supports Batten Disease research and therapeutic development, with Emily’s work ensuring metadata accuracy and database reliability for researchers.

In the Open-Source Software category, we also recognised Alessandro Felder and the BrainGlobe Initiative, a collaborative project focused on creating open-access tools that support neuroscientific research worldwide. Although Alessandro couldn’t attend the ceremony, we were proud to recognise this initiative’s impressive accomplishments. Founded in 2020 to advance the handling and analysis of neuroimaging data, the BrainGlobe tools have been downloaded over 2.7 million times around the world!

After the presentations, the audience had a chance to network and enjoy refreshments provided by UCL Press, the event’s generous sponsor.

We would like to extend a special thank you to our other honorable mention recipients: Beth Downe, Gabrielle Pengyu Shao, Deborah Padfield, Dr. Adam Parker, Hengrui Zhang, Mathilde Ripart, Justyna Petke, Claire Waddington, and Fan Cheng. Representing a range of departments, teams, and centres across UCL – from the Slade School of Fine Art to the Dementia Research Centre – we were thrilled to celebrate your work and dedication to advancing open science across disciplines. Thank you for being part of this event!

Our heartfelt thanks go to UCL Press for their support, the Office for Open Science & Scholarship team for organising the awards, and Sandy Schumann and Jessie Baldwin, UKRN local network leads, for managing the submission and peer review process. Special thanks go to Paul Ayris, Head of the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship, and David Shanks, UCL’s Institutional Lead for Reproducibility, for their continued support of these awards.

Watch this space for the next Open Science and Scholarship Awards!

Guest post by Christine Daoutis, Copyright Support Officer

Welcome to the inaugural blog post of a collaborative series between the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship and the UCL Copyright team. In this series, we will explore important aspects of copyright and its implications for open research and scholarship.

Research ideas, projects, and their outcomes often involve using and producing materials that may be protected by copyright. Copyright protects a range of creative works, whether we are talking about a couple of notes in a notebook, a draft thesis chapter, the rough write-up of a data, a full monograph and the content of this very blog. While a basic knowledge of copyright is essential, particularly to stay within the law, there is much more to copyright than compliance. Understanding certain aspects of copyright can help you use copyright materials with more confidence, make use of your own rights and overall, enhance the openness of your research.

Image attribution: Patrick Hochstenbach, 2014. Available under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This first post in our series is dedicated to exploring common questions that arise during research projects. In future posts, we will explore some of these questions further, providing guidance, linking to new resources, and signposting relevant workshops. Copyright-related enquiries often arise in the following areas:

Reusing other people’s materials: How do you GET permission to reuse someone else’s images, figures, software, questionnaires, or research data? Do you always need permission? Is use for ‘non-commercial, research’ purposes always permitted, or are there other factors to consider? How do licenses work, and what can you do when a license does not cover your use? It’s easy to be overconfident when using others’ materials, for example, by assuming that images found on the internet can be reused without permission. It’s equally easy to be too cautious, ending up not making use of valuable resources for fear of infringing someone’s rights. Understanding permissions, licenses, and copyright exceptions – what may be within your rights to do as a user – can help you.

Disseminating your research throughout the research cycle: There are open access options for your publications and theses, supporting access to and often, reuse of your work. How do you license your work for reuse? What do the different licenses mean, and which one is most suitable? What about materials produced early on in your research: study preregistrations, research data, preprints? How can you make data FAIR through licensing? What do you need to consider when making software and other materials open source?

Is your work protected in the first place? Documents, images, video and other materials are usually protected by copyright. Facts are not. For a work to be protected it needs to be ‘original’. What does ‘original’ mean in this context? Are data protected by copyright? What other rights may apply to a work?

Who owns your research? We are raising questions about licensing and disseminating your research, but is it yours to license? What does the law say, and what is the default position for staff and students at UCL? How do contracts, including publisher copyright transfer agreements and data sharing agreements, affect how you can share your research?

‘Text and data mining’. Many research projects involve computational analysis of large amounts of data. This involves copying and processing materials protected by copyright, and often publishing the outcomes of this analysis. In which cases is this lawful? How do licences permit you to do, exactly, and what can you do under exceptions to copyright? How are your text and data mining activities limited if you are collaborating with others, across institutions and countries?

The use of AI. Speaking of accessing large amounts of data, what is the current situation on intellectual property and generative AI? What do you need to know about legal implications where use of AI is involved?

These questions are not here to overwhelm you but to highlight areas where we can offer you support, training, and opportunities for discussion. To know more:

• Follow future posts on this blog.
• Register for an upcoming copyright session. If you cannot make those dates, please contact copyright@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a bespoke session.
• Visit our training and resources page for more ideas and links to online tutorials.
• Have a head start: visit our guidance on copyright and publications, copyright and research data and look out for upcoming guidance on text and data mining.

Get involved!

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

Guest post by Dr Christiana McMahon,  Research Data Support Officer

In June 2019, the Research Data Management team from Library Services and the Research Data Group from the Centre for Advanced Research Computing embarked on an exciting journey: the launch of the UCL Research Data Repository. As we approach our fifth anniversary, we find ourselves reflecting on the progress we’ve made, what we’ve achieved and what could be improved. To better understand the impact and gather insights from our UCL community, we invite you to complete this survey here. Join us in celebrating this important milestone!

Since its inception, the Research Data Repository has been a pivotal tool for openness and accessibility, offering UCL staff and research students a platform to archive, publish, and share their research outputs as widely and openly as possible. From datasets to figures, presentations to software, the repository has become a hub of scholarly exchange and collaboration. The journey thus far has been marked by significant milestones. Since 2019, we’ve seen over 385,000 downloads and 610,000 views, underscoring the repository’s impact and reach within the academic community.

Figure 1 Graph to show total number of items published using the Research Data Repository

The Research Data Repository enables users to:

• archive and preserve research outputs on a longer-term basis at UCL;
• facilitate the discovery and sharing of work by publishing metadata records;
• assign a digital object identifier (DOI) to permanently link to and identify a record in the online catalogue as part of a full data citation enabling others to reference published works;
• comply with the UCL Research Data policy and other applicable research policies.

Three highlights from the Research Data Repository:

The most viewed record is: Silvester, Christopher; Hillson, Simon (2019). Photographs used for Structure from Motion 3D Dental model generation Part 2. University College London. Figure. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9939419

The most downloaded record is: Acton, Sophie; Kriston-Vizi, Janos; Singh, Tanya; Martinez, Victor (2019). RNA seq – PDPN/CLEC-2 transcription in FRCs. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9976112.v1

The most cited record is: Manescu, Petru; Shaw, Mike; Elmi, Muna; Zajiczek, Lydia; Claveau, Remy; Pawar, Vijay; et al. (2020). Giemsa Stained Thick Blood Films for Clinical Microscopy Malaria Diagnosis with Deep Neural Networks Dataset.. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12173568.v1

These milestones demonstrate the repository’s impact and reach within the academic community, serving as a testament to the collaborative efforts of our dedicated researchers and staff.

Figure 2: Stages of Research Data Lifecycle

Why is the Research Data Repository essential to supporting academic communities across UCL?

It mostly stems from wanting researchers to manage and share their outputs in line with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable)  and embrace open science and scholarship practices. Essentially, by depositing outputs into the Research Data Repository and creating associated metadata records, other researchers and members of the public are better placed to find, understand, combine, and reuse the outputs of our research without major technical barriers. In turn, this can help to enhance transparency of the research process, promote enhanced research integrity, and ultimately maximise the value of research findings.

Going forward:

To continue building and developing the service, we are asking staff and research students to tell us what they think. What works well? What could be improved? Which functionalities would you like to see added or enhanced?

The survey closes on Friday, March 22nd, so get in touch and tell us what you think!

Survey link: https://forms.microsoft.com/e/U20yJPAi0W

More information about the Research Data Repository can be found in Open Science & Research Support dedicated webpage.

Any questions or queries about the Research Data Repository can be sent to: researchdatarepository@ucl.ac.uk.

General research data management queries can be sent to: lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk.

Any questions or queries about open science can be directed to: openscience@ucl.ac.uk.

Get involved!

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

Guest post by Michelle Harricharan, Senior Research Data Steward, in celebration of International Love Data Week 2024.

ARC Data Stewards have completed the first phase of work on the third-party datasets project, aiming to help researchers better access and manage data provided to UCL by external organisations.

The problem:

Modern research often requires access to large volumes of data generated outside of universities. These datasets, provided to UCL by third parties, are typically generated during routine service delivery or other activities and are used in research to identify patterns and make predictions. UCL research and teaching increasingly rely on access to these datasets to achieve their objectives, ranging from NHS data to large-scale commercial datasets such as those provided by ‘X’ (formerly known as Twitter).

Currently, there is no centrally supported process for research groups seeking to access third-party datasets. Researchers sometimes use departmental procedures to acquire personal or university-wide licenses for third-party datasets. They then transfer, store, document, extract, and undertake actions to minimize information risk before using the data for various analyses. The process to obtain third-party data involves significant overhead, including contracts, compliance (IG), and finance. Delays in acquiring access to data can be a significant barrier to research. Some UCL research teams also provide additional support services such as sharing, managing access to, licensing, and redistributing specialist third-party datasets for other research teams. These teams increasingly take on governance and training responsibilities for these specialist datasets. Concurrently, the e-resources team in the library negotiates access to third-party datasets for UCL staff and students following established library procedures.

It has long been recognized that UCL’s processes for acquiring and managing third-party data are uncoordinated and inefficient, leading to inadvertent duplication, unnecessary expense, and underutilisation of datasets that could support transformative research across multiple projects or research groups. This was recognised in the “Data First, 2019 UCL Research Data Strategy”.

What we did:

Last year, the ARC Data Stewards team reached out to UCL professional services staff and researchers to understand the processes and challenges they faced regarding accessing and using third-party research datasets. We hoped that insights from these conversations could be used to develop more streamlined support and services for researchers and make it easier for them to find and use data already provided to UCL by third parties (where this is within licensing conditions).

During this phase of work, we spoke with 14 members of staff:

• 7 research teams that manage third-party datasets
• 7 members of professional services that support or may support the process, including contracts, data protection, legal, Information Services Division (databases), information security, research ethics and integrity, and the library.

What we’ve learned:

An important aspect of this work involved capturing the existing processes researchers use when accessing, managing, storing, sharing, and deleting third-party research data at UCL. This enabled us to understand the range of processes involved in handling this type of data and identify the various stakeholders involved—or who potentially need to be involved. In practice, we found that researchers follow similar processes to access and manage third-party research data, depending on the security of the dataset. However, as there is no central, agreed procedure to support the management of third-party datasets in the organization, different parts of the process may be implemented differently by different teams using the methods and resources available to them. We turned the challenges researchers identified in accessing and managing this type of data into requirements for a suite of services to support the delivery and management of third-party datasets at UCL.

Next steps:

 We have been working on addressing some of the common challenges researchers identified. Researchers noted that getting contracts agreed and signed off takes too long, so we reached out to the RIS Contract Services Team, who are actively working to build additional capacity into the service as part of a wider transformation programme.

Also, information about accessing and managing third-party datasets is fragmented, and researchers often don’t know where to go for help, particularly for governance and technical advice. To counter this, we are bringing relevant professional services together to agree on a process for supporting access to third-party datasets.

Finally, respondents noted that there is too much duplication of data. The costs for data are high, and it’s not easy to know what’s already available internally to reuse. In response, we are building a searchable catalogue of third-party datasets already licensed to UCL researchers and available for others to request access to reuse.

Our progress will be reported to the Research Data Working Group, which acts as a central point of contact and a forum for discussion on aspects of research data support at UCL. The group advocates for continual improvement of research data governance.

If you would like to know more about any of these strands of work, please do not hesitate to reach out (email: researchdata-support@ucl.ac.uk). We are keen to work with researchers and other professional services to solve these shared challenges and accelerate research and collaboration using third-party datasets.

Get involved!

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

Guest post by Iona Preston, Research Data Support Officer, in celebration of International Love Data Week 2024.

Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash.

While there are a lot of general resources to support good research data management practices – for example UCL’s Research Data Management webpages – you might sometimes be looking for something a bit more specific. It’s good practice to store your data in a research data repository that is subject specific, where other people in your research discipline are most likely to search for data. However, you might not know where to begin your search. You could be looking for discipline-specific metadata standards, so your data is more easily reusable by academic colleagues in your subject area. This is where subject-specific research data management resources become valuable. Here are some resources for specific subject areas and disciplines that you might find useful: 

• The Research Data Management Toolkit for Life Sciences
  This resource guides you through the entire process of managing research data, explaining which tools to use at each stage of the research data lifecycle. It includes sections on specific life science research areas, from plant sciences to rare disease data. These sections also cover research community-specific repositories and examples of metadata standards. 
• Visual arts data skills for researchers: Toolkits
  This consists of two different tutorials covering an introduction to research data management in the visual arts and how to create an appropriate data management plan. 
• Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives
  CESSDA brings together data archives from across Europe in a searchable catalogue. Their website includes various resources for social scientists to learn more about data management and sharing, along with an extensive training section and a Data Management Expert Guide to lead you through the data management process. 
• Research Data Alliance for Disciplines (various subject areas)
  The Research Data Alliance is an international initiative to promote data sharing. They have a webpage with special interest groups in various academic research areas, including agriculture, biomedical sciences, chemistry, digital humanities, social science, and librarianship, with useful resource lists for each discipline. 
• RDA Metadata Standards Catalogue (all subject areas)
  This directory helps you find a suitable metadata scheme to describe your data, organized by subject area, featuring specific schemes across a wide range of academic disciplines. 
• Re3Data (all subject areas)
  When it comes to sharing data, we always recommend you check if there’s a subject specific repository first, as that’s the best place to share. If you don’t know where to start finding one, this is a great place to look with a convenient browse feature to explore available options within your discipline.

These are only some of the different discipline specific tools that are available. You can find more for your discipline on the Research Data Management webpages. If you need any help and advice on finding data management resources, please get in touch with the Research Data Management team on lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk.  

Get involved!

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!