UCL Library Services is pleased to invite UCL staff to an afternoon of information and discussion about the UK Data Service (UKDS).

The UKDS is funded by the ESRC to meet the data needs of researchers, students and teachers in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Its collection includes major UK government-sponsored surveys, cross-national surveys, longitudinal studies, UK census data, international aggregate, business data, and qualitative data.

Participants will learn how to access these collections as well as how to deposit their own research data and sources in the UKDS repository, ReShare. During the drop-in session participants will be able to ask questions about data sharing, ESRC data management plans, consent procedures, data storage, encryption and more.

The event will take place in the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Common Ground.

See the programme and book your place.

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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As a result of ongoing UCU strike action there is likely to be reduced availability for support at the next Research IT and Data Management drop-in on the 13th March.

Future dates are advertised on the Research IT services page.

From Monday 29^th March 2018, the AHRC will be removing the requirements for Technical Plans and replacing these with a new Data Management Plan requirement. This will be mandatory for all Research Grants, Follow on Funding and Leadership Fellows proposals.

What does this mean for your proposal?

If you are currently in the process of developing a Technical Plan as part of an application you will need to submit it before the requirements change (29th March 2018). After this data all projects will require a Data Management Plan.

How to complete a Data Management Plan?

We have a guidance on our webpage on completing Data Management Plans. UCL’s Research Data Support Officers can review draft Data Management Plans emailed two weeks before submission deadlines. DMPOnline will include templates for the new plan alongside templates for the technical plan during the overlap of the two systems.

You can find further information on the changes from the Digital Curation Centre and on the AHRC website.

To celebrate the 3rd international Love Data Week, several Research Data Management teams from London universities have joined forces. More than 15 free events are taking place across Bloomsbury from Monday 12th to Friday 16th of February.

Most events are open to all UCL research staff and research students; here is an overview:

• Get Ready for GDPR: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 1pm
• What’s my Research Data?: Monday, 2pm
• UCL Research IT & Data Management drop-in: Tuesday, 10am
• Get Your Data In Shape (Organizing and Documenting): Tuesday, 2pm
• Working With Audio Visual Data: Wednesday, 11am
• Consumer Data Research Centre drop-in: Wednesday, 11am-2pm
• Working With Personal Data: Wednesday, 2pm
• Making the Most of Your Research Data: Thursday, 11am
• UCL Introduction to Digital Scholarship and Open Research: Thursday, 1.30pm
• Data Management Planning: Thursday, 3pm
• Introduction to UK Data Service: Friday, 2-3.3opm

A full listing of events is available to share.

For any UCL-specific questions, please contact the UCL Research Data Support officers at lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk.

UCL Research IT Services (RITS) organise regular informal events where you can learn about useful tools and techniques which will help with your research while meeting other students and staff who use computers for science. Each event features a short talk followed by informal discussion over pizza and drinks.

The next Research Programming Technical Social event will take place on the 24th of January; it will focus on the Gamma project and its effort to make open data accessible and relevant to wide audience. Find more information and how to register.

The previous presentations of these monthly events are available on the website of the UCL Research Programming Hub.

Photo by Epic Fireworks / CC BY

Students and staff can now book new 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.

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.

Each 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.

Two sessions will take place in Term 2: on Wednesdays 07/02 and 21/03 (2-5pm).

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

Two upcoming events organised by Open Research London exploring open science/research are open for booking:

The first event is taking place on the 21st of November and is a satellite event of the OpenCon 2017 conference. During the day there will be a ‘hackathon’ focusing on the themes of ‘Open for reproducibility’ and ‘Open for collaborative-coding’. You can find more information and book here. In the evening of the 21st, there will be a number of talks on open access and open science. Further information and booking here.

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The UCL Organisational Development team organises induction sessions open to new post-docs and any new research staff to discover researcher development opportunities and research support services available to them.

Booking is now open for sessions on the 13/12, 14/03 and 06/06; each event will be followed by a reception. Read the programme and book now.

More information for new starters is also available in the UCL Research Staff Hub.