Research Data Management Practices: A Snapshot in Time

Mary Anne Kennan,Lina Markauskaite

doi:10.2218/ijdc.v10i2.329

Abstract

There is increasing pressure from funders, publishers, the public, universities and other research organisations for researchers to improve their data management and sharing practices. However, little is known about researchersâ€™ data management and sharing practices and concerns. The research reported in this paper seeks to address this by providing insight into the research data management and sharing practices of academics at ten universities in New South Wales, Australia. Empirical data was taken from a survey to which 760 academics responded, with 634 completing at least one section. Results showed that at the time of the survey there were a wide variety of research data in use, including analogue data, and that the challenges researchers faced in managing their data included finding safe and secure storage, particularly after project completion, but also during projects when data are used (and thus stored) on a wide variety of less-than-optimal temporary devices. Data sharing was not widely practiced and only a relatively small proportion of researchers had a research data management plan. Since the survey was completed much has changed: capacities and communities are being built around data management and sharing and policies, and guidelines are being constructed. Data storage and curation services are now more freely available. It will be interesting to observe how the findings of future studies compare with those reported here.

Highlights

Introduction andBackground“Because I am no longer storing my data on the Arts Faculty shared server, I feel as though I am dicing with death.”During the last decade, national and international attention has been increasingly focused on promoting research data management and access to publicly funded research data
Researchers increasingly feel pressure to improve and sometimes radically change their data management and sharing practices. This pressure comes from research funders seeking to add value to expensive research and solve cross-disciplinary grand challenges, from publishers seeking to be responsive to calls for transparency and reproducibility of the scientific record, organisations seeking to manage potentially valuable data, and the public seeking to gain and reuse knowledge for their own purposes using new online tools (Borgman, 2007)
Other disciplines with a 10% or higher representation were Education (12.9%), Social Sciences and Humanities (11.2%), and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) (10.0%)

Summary

Introduction and Background

“Because I am no longer storing my data on the Arts Faculty shared server, I feel as though I am dicing with death.”. We conclude with the recommendations that in addition to provision of infrastructure (such as storage) and services (such as curation) there are issues for researchers about which further discussion and/or education is necessary These include issues identified by researchers such as how to manage ethical concerns, privacy and confidentiality; how to make decisions about the future usefulness of data; and how to provide support with technical issues, such as metadata creation and curation across the lifecycle to prevent obsolescence and loss

Literature

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Discussion and Conclusions