Data management and curation of research data in academic scientific research environments

Abstract

AbstractThe Structural Bioinformatics Core Facility at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SBI Core) assists researchers university‐wide in computational structural biology techniques and incorporating structural biology/bioinformatics into their grants and publications. The SBI Core works with a diverse population of researchers from numerous departments and provides support to an ever‐changing body of research. The computational biology services provided by the SBI Core are data‐intensive and use a diverse and distributed set of applications for processing, data storage, and data management.As the amount of data and number of projects have increased, the SBI Core requires an effective strategy for managing data and facilitating data sharing between the SBI Core and the researchers it assists. The UNC‐CH Health Sciences Library (HSL) has begun a collaborative project with the SBI Core to identify the crucial data management needs and to envision new roles for the library in e‐science and data management. In partnership, the SBI Core and the HSL have identified major obstacles in data sharing, data management, and data access. Furthermore, the SBI Core and the HSL will develop solutions in which the library facilitates collaboration among campus resources and matches unmet needs to external resources. One of the library's goals in this proof‐of‐concept project with the SBI Core is to become a central campus resource for research support and data management.