Photo by A.Wilkinson / CC BY

This regular training course introduces PhD students to research support available during the course of their studies. It is relevant for all PhD students, whatever the stage reached in their project and is applicable to all disciplines.

The half-day session focuses on Research Integrity, Research Data Management, Data Protection, Research Ethics, Open Access and Research IT. The course highlights good practices in these areas, explains the expectations of researchers and points them to relevant UCL support services.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 27/03/2019 (10am-1pm).

Booking information is available on the Doctoral Skills Development Programme website.

Students and staff can book new ISD courses to develop their skills in a wide range of topics, including bibliographic software, data analysis, databases, graphic applications, SharePoint, UNIX, R, spreadsheets and more.

Digital skills drop-ins are also available during term time, on Wednesdays.

Find more information about dates, locations and how to book the courses.

Photo by Epic Fireworks / CC BY

This regular training course introduces PhD students to research support available during the course of their studies. It is relevant for all PhD students, whatever the stage reached in their project and is applicable to all disciplines.

The half-day session focuses on Research Integrity, Research Data Management, Data Protection, Research Ethics, Open Access and Research IT. The course highlights good practices in these areas, explains the expectations of researchers and points them to relevant UCL support services.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 30/01/2019 (2-5pm).

Booking information is available on the Doctoral Skills Development Programme website.

This guide will aim to provide some useful advice for students on finding data to re-use during their research projects.

Data Resources Online

You may want to start by using UCL Explore to search for research studies based on secondary datasets. From there, you can consult the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) – a global repository of research data. It is also best kept in mind that different datasets require different permissions. If you are planning to use safeguarded or controlled access data, you will need to abide by additional conditions for accessing it. For example, this may include specific forms of citation, depositor permission to registration and authentication of the users of the data. There are plenty of online courses to help you navigate your way through the use of digital datasets. The University of Edinburgh run an online research data management training programme called MANTRA to help researchers learn how to manage their digital data. Furthermore, the UK Data Service provides a range of dataset and topic guides along with video tutorials on how to use data.

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We are pleased to announce the following workshops and events taking place in the up and coming weeks.

Knowledge Quarter Codes Technical Social – 21 November 2018

The popular UCL Research Programming Technical Socials are now expanding under the name ‘Knowledge Quarter Codes’ in order to welcome participation from academic and industrial organisations across the Knowledge Quarter – the area within a 1-mile radius of King’s Cross station. This is an informal event aimed at anyone with an interest in the computational methods and technology behind research and innovation. The next event will be hosted by Prof. Luca Vigano from King’s College London on Explainable Security – a new paradigm in security research.

This event will take place in UCL’s Chandler House premises on the 21 of November from 5pm to 6:30pm. You can register for the event here.

Dive into Data Challenge 2019

UCL researchers from across all disciplines are cordially invited to take part in the Dive into Data Challenge 2019. Researchers are encouraged to develop novel and innovative ways to analyse and/or data from the Consumer Data Research Centre to gain insights into UCL’s Grand Challenges priority themes through data re-use. Participants will also have the chance to win a £500 prize and present their work at the UCL Conference in June 2019. 

• Deadline for expression of interest and brief summary submission is 18 January 2019.
• Any questions you have about the challenge can be answered at the next RITS drop-in sessions on 15 November and 12 December 10am-12pm.

More information on the challenge is available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/research/domains/eresearch/diveintodata

Digital Skills Development Opportunities

There are new dates available for Digital Skills Development courses and workshops for both staff and students. These workshops will cover sessions on Excel, Word, STATA, R, Unix, Photoshop plus many more. A weekly drop is also provided for individual guidance. A full schedule can be found here.

JISC will be running a workshop on research notebook management in London on the 19^th of November. The event will cover the requirements of research notebooks, the tools needed to manage them and how this relates to researchers’ own subject specialisms.

Researchers with an interest in exploring the use and management of lab notebooks are strongly encouraged to attend.

An Eventbrite is available for any researchers who are interested in attending the session.

The Research Data Management and Research IT teams run regular drop-in sessions. These sessions are open to all UCL research staff and research students and will be attended by someone from the Research Data Management team as well as representatives from all of the RITS service areas; if you have any questions or problems related the following areas, you should find someone there who can help:

• research programming
• workflow automation
• finding tools and services for your research programmes
• high performance computing
• handling large datasets
• handling sensitive data
• data storage
• Research Data Management (including Data Management Plans).

There’s no need to book, but we can make sure there’ll be someone there to help with your problem if you email rits@ucl.ac.uk ideally two days before the session.

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Photo by A.Wilkinson / CC BY

This regular training course introduces PhD students to research support available during the course of their studies. It is relevant for all PhD students, whatever the stage reached in their project and is applicable to all disciplines.

The half-day session focuses on Research Integrity, Research Data Management, Data Protection, Research Ethics, Open Access and Research IT. The course highlights good practices in these areas, explains the expectations of researchers and points them to relevant UCL support services.

The last session of this academic year will take place on Tuesday 24/04 (10am-1pm).

Booking information is available on the Doctoral Skills Development Programme website.

The Research Data Management and Research IT teams run regular drop-in sessions. These sessions are open to all UCL research staff and research students and will be attended by someone from the Research Data Management team as well as representatives from all of the RITS service areas; if you have any questions or problems related the following areas, you should find someone there who can help:

• research programming
• workflow automation
• finding tools and services for your research programmes
• high performance computing
• handling large datasets
• handling sensitive data
• data storage
• Research Data Management (including Data Management Plans).

There’s no need to book, but we can make sure there’ll be someone there to help with your problem if you email rits@ucl.ac.uk ideally two days before the session.

(more…)

In 2017 we conducted a series of short interviews as part of the LEARN project. We asked several UCL researchers about data management and data sharing in their disciplines.

Dr Josep Grau-Bove is a Lecturer in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology; he works at the Institute for Sustainable Heritage (Bartlett School Environment, Energy & Resources). He is the Assistant Director of one of the Institute’s Programmes for MRes students.

In our interview he reflects on the benefits of Data Management Plans for research students, the technical challenges of managing data and the importance of data sharing within his Institute. He also highlights the need to raise students’ awareness of good practices in data management.

Watch Josep’s 4-minute interview (opens a new window in Youtube).