Abstract
This article reports an international study of research data management (RDM) activities, services, and capabilities in higher education libraries. It presents the results of a survey covering higher education libraries in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK. The results indicate that libraries have provided leadership in RDM, particularly in advocacy and policy development. Service development is still limited, focused especially on advisory and consultancy services (such as data management planning support and data‐related training), rather than technical services (such as provision of a data catalog, and curation of active data). Data curation skills development is underway in libraries, but skills and capabilities are not consistently in place and remain a concern. Other major challenges include resourcing, working with other support services, and achieving “buy in” from researchers and senior managers. Results are compared with previous studies in order to assess trends and relative maturity levels. The range of RDM activities explored in this study are positioned on a “landscape maturity model,” which reflects current and planned research data services and practice in academic libraries, representing a “snapshot” of current developments and a baseline for future research.
Highlights
In the last 10 years, an international agenda around research data management (RDM) has emerged
A majority of institutions responding to the question about policies in late 2014 (n 5 167) either already had an RDM policy or expected to have one in place within 12 months (Australia 94%, Canada 40%, Germany 100%, Ireland 71%, the Netherlands 100%, NZ 71%, UK 86%)
In the UK where most institutions report a policy, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has been influential in steering institutions towards developing an RDM policy and Jisc has funded a number of pathfinder projects (Cox & Pinfield, 2014)
Summary
In the last 10 years, an international agenda around research data management (RDM) has emerged This has been driven by a number of inter-related factors, including increasingly data-intensive science, policy changes among research funders, a recognition of the critical requirement for a focused and coordinated approach to data stewardship in research institutions, and the economic and social imperative to improve access to research outputs for educational, public sector, and commercial organizations (Borgman, 2015; Pryor, Jones, & Whyte, 2014; Ray, 2014). Universities have begun to address this strategic objective, and a range of institutional stakeholders including academic libraries, have become engaged in developing policy, services, and infrastructure. Their increasing focus on institutional support for RDM has drawn on the prior experience of libraries in developing digital services and open-access repositories, RDM has created significant new challenges for library managers. This study reports the results of a major international survey of RDM activities and services in libraries, in order to contribute to the ongoing discussion
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