Update from the research data management team
What have the RDM team been up to over the past 12 months? A lot has happened over past year but the most important thing to mention is that we moved. Since May 2019 we are no longer part of the Library, we joined Research & Innovation Services (RIS). Our blog and website followed us shortly after.
The Research Data Management and the Open Access blog joined forces in the brand new St Andrews Open Research blog (this blog). We are also on Twitter, sharing the @StAndrewsOpenResearch account with the Open Access team.
The content of our website it is still the same but it can be found at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/research/digitalresearch/researchdata/.
In August we welcomed a new member of staff to the RDM team, Giota Spanou, who joined us from the School of Medicine. Giota helps with enquiries, data deposits in Pure, with issuing of DOIs and with monitoring open data availability.
We have also been working on a project to introduce the requirement for PhD students to submit a data management plan as part of their first year review. The proposal has been submitted to the Postgraduate Research Committee who supports the proposal but advised us to work with University Teaching and Research Ethics Committee (UTREC) to make sure that the data management plan template we intend to provide does not overlap with the ethics application form. We will post more details about the project over the next few weeks, so watch this space.
As usual we have also been checking publications looking for references to dataset, creating datasets records, issuing DOIs for data etc. Since February 2019 we have checked 1976 publications, created 578 dataset records in Pure and issued 192 DOIs.
We spend a significant amount of time checking for datasests and creating reference records for data deposited elsewhere. Why? This allows us to monitor the Institution’s open data rates over time. As Figure 2 shows, the open data rates for the past 12 months and irrespective of funding is 48%, while if we only look at those publications that acknowledge any of the UKRI funders, Wellcome Trust, Royal Society or H2020 the value goes up to 58%.
These figures account for all datasets we can find, no matter where they are deposited. This is why we create reference records when the dataset is deposited in another repository or archive. Figure 3 shows where the datasets recorded n Pure are actually deposited. Only 28% of all our datasets are deposited in our data repository, the remaining 72% is elsewhere and in Pure we only keep a record of their location.
Since 2018 PhD students are encouraged to deposit in Pure research data underpinning their theses. So far 97 datasets underpinning theses have been deposited in Pure and given a DOI. Some are under embargoed but 22 are publicly available on the St Andrews Research portal. Figure 4 shows the number of datasets underpinning theses data deposited over the past two years.
This is just a short summary of what we have been up to but if you want to know more get in touch with us or come and see us in the Old Union Diner.