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Digital Repository Services for Managing Research Data: What Do Oxford Researchers Need?

UK researchers are facing the challenges of having to comply with funder requirements to submit data management plans and make their data available. Academic institutions have the responsibility to support their researchers to fulfill their contractual requirements with funding agencies. Increasingly, repository services are dealing with the management of research output. Managing research data to ensure digital materials adhere to the right standards and are securely stored, shared and preserved can be complex and resource intensive. Understanding how researchers work is the key to designing university repository services to manage research data. This article describes the University of Oxford’s federation of digital repositories and introduces the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project to present the findings from the requirements gathering exercise carried out to understand Oxford researchers’ practices and needs. . Introduction The proliferation of gadgets that deliver information ming In the current climate of large scale international projects around research data such as the Australian National Data Service, the US National Science Foundation DataNet and the UK Research Data Service, the management of research data is a topic that attracts interest from policy makers worldwide because of the importance of data in the age of the knowledge economy (PMSEIC 2006). There are many efforts to foster standards for data description and sharing as well as to establish national and international federations of digital repositories to deal with the management and curation of these digital resources. UK Universities and their researchers are facing the challenges themselves. Researchers in all disciplines are increasingly being asked by funding bodies to not only make their data available but also to submit data management and data sharing plans with their funding applications. These plans should describe what datasets will be created that are worth keeping, what standards will be used, how they will be made available and who will be responsible for their long-term preservation (Weaver 2007). Managing and curating research data poses many challenges because of their heterogeneity and a lack of standards as well as many unresolved ethical issues (Carusi & Jirotka 2008). Some of the benefits of the active management and curation of research data include the possibility to replicate research results, avoiding expensive data collection by promoting data reuse and protecting the contributor’s sensitive information (Schroeder & Axelsson 2007). When planning how best to manage and curate research data, efforts are sometimes mainly focused on understanding the data themselves, the different types, their volume and specific technical or legal issues surrounding them. Nonetheless engaging with the producers and users of those datasets is at times forgotten. Understanding researchers’ needs and workflows will help to comprehend how they work with data, why they create them in the first place and their reasons for managing these resources the way they do. This approach will also assist to identify services to support them throughout their research process so that they can fulfill the requirements from funders. This paper describes briefly Oxford’s federation of digital repositories and then introduces the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project and the findings of the requirement gathering exercise carried out between May and June 2008 as part of the project. Background: A Federation of Digital Repositories in a Collegiate University The University of Oxford, the oldest university in the English speaking world, has a complex structure with divisional departments, institutes, independent colleges and more than a hundred libraries. A highly devolved institution which has on many occasions been compared to a microcosm of the entire UK Higher Education system; this organizational arrangement is mirrored with a devolved computing structure (Jeffreys 2008). The main central ICT service provider is Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) that operates the primary computing infrastructure such as core networks, back up servers and core support services. Another central service provider providing ICT for its users is the Oxford University Library Services (OULS). These centralized services are complemented with local ones embedded in departments, institutes and colleges with their own ICT infrastructure and support teams.