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Researchers

Researchers and Principle Inverstigators (PIs)

Funding bodies and institutions now expect all researchers, and especially Principal Investigators (PIs), to take a more active role in curation. DCC helps you understand what digital curation means, as well as 'Who does what' - the roles involved in curation. We can direct you to the data policies relevant to you, and guide you through a data management plan for your project.

Whether or not your role already focuses on data management, DCC's briefings and how-to guides will add to your understanding of the curation lifecycle, and what you can gain from safeguarding your research assets for future reuse.

We also help you find training courses to build your skills, offer our own Curation 101 introductory courses, as well as roadshow events to help you connect with others in your area doing digital research or supporting it.

Practical curation involves dealing with data risks, and identifying opportunities to benefit from their better management. This is tackled in the Data Asset Framework (DAF). Our Projects pages and Catalogue of Tools will help you find and assess tools that can help you exploit data further, or recommend resources to others. You can also catch up with new resources and developments in our news and blog pages.

Researchers are increasingly seeing an impact from sharing research more openly, and face increased demand for open access to research material. Our open science case studies profile experiences in various fields.

Your institution may offer detailed support for your data management needs. To help you get started we can point you to examples from UK institutions on data storage, backup and security. You can also benefit from our guide on how to licence research data, plus briefings on Freedom of Information (FOI) and other legal aspects of curation.

Senior Research Managers

We can help you track the emerging significance of data curation to shape your HEI’s policies and codes of practice for research, to engage your research communities and other stakeholders, and to help coordinate professional development and research assessments. DCC points you to relevant information on UK data policies to help you formulate guidelines for research integrity and responsible conduct in your institution. We condense funding body data policies and provide an overview of the curation roles and lifecycle of curation activities required to sustain compliance with these.

Faced with downward pressure on funding, it is more important than ever to safeguard research assets including the ‘intellectual capital’ in data. Ultimately the development of research data services and infrastructure is about safeguarding this. DCC roadshow events can help you identify synergies between developments in your own locale, in national JISC programmes and elsewhere. The ERIS project exemplifies a cross-institutional policy framework for data repositories in the context of a Scottish research pool.

To help you coordinate skills development in research data management we provide starter courses that can be tailored to your institution’s needs for career development or postgraduate training.

Maximising impact from research nowadays is partly about sharing all research assets more openly. Balancing that against IPR and other concerns requires guidance on how to licence data. We profile data sharing experiences in various fields in the open science case studies and also provide briefings on Freedom of Information (FOI) and other legal aspects of curation.

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