Presentation given by Rebecca Grant at the Archives and Records Association conference, Manchester, 1 September 2017,

1. Records Professionals and
Research Data – a new role?
Rebecca Grant, Research Data
Manager, Springer Nature
1 September 2017

2. 1
Records Professionals and Research Data – a new role?
1.0
What is research data management?

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
2
• Open Access is a global initiative which has gained traction since the 2000s
and rise of the Internet
• Promoting the concept that the outputs of publicly funded research should be
accessible publicly for consultation and reuse
• Influences policy for higher education
institutions, journal publishers, and funding
agencies
Becoming more and more important for the data underpinning research, as
well as the articles which describe research
Why research data management? Open Access driving
research data publication

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
But what is research data?
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
Credit: Queridian Solutions queridian.com

5. 4
Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Research data is data which is the subject or product of
research
Physical
sciences
Earth
sciences
Social sciences
Biology Humanities

6. 5
Records professionals and research data – a new role?
 Store data securely over the lifetime
of their research
 Create metadata and provide
adequate description and context so
that it can be understood by others
 Select which data are relevant for
publication or long-term storage
 Identify any rights issues associated
with the data
 Select a suitable repository to store
or publish their data
 Ensure that their data will be
preserved for as long as it is needed
How do researchers prepare to make their data available?
Credit: Nestle Institute of Health Sciences

7. 6
Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Conceptualising research data management
Credit: The Digital Curation Centre,
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/cu
ration-lifecycle-model

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
The records continuum
Organise
Capture
Create
•Archive
•Memory
•Record
•Evidence
•Document
•Trace

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
The Archival Advantage (Jackie Dooley for OCLC Research)
Clarifying legal ownership of digital property/legal ownership of IP
Appraising the significance or value of data
Capturing context of creation or use
Facilitating preservation of materials for the future
Efficiently creating collection-level metadata
How can records managers and archivists contribute to
research data management?
https://tinyurl.com/y9zpe9u6

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
2.0
Research Data Management at Springer Nature

11. 10
Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Springer Nature is a leading research, educational and professional publisher, providing
quality content to our communities through a range of innovative platforms, products
and services.
Home to brands including Springer, Nature Research, BioMed Central, Palgrave
Macmillan and Scientific American.
As the leading open access publisher, we see the rise of open research in all its
manifestations as one of the major forces reshaping the way that researchers
communicate and collaborate to advance the pace and quality of discovery.
Our focus is on investing in and creating tools, services or training that help the research
community to understand and utilise new ideas and concepts.

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
“making research
more
transparent,
more
collaborative and
more efficient”*
What do we mean by open research?
*Source: Wikipedia, adapted
• Beyond open access
• Not just journals, books too!
• Broader than “open science”
• Inclusive of HSS
• Open data
• Collaboration tools
• Open peer review
… and more that we haven’t
imagined yet

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Advice on:
• Complying with the research data policy of their target journal(s)
• Finding community data repositories for their research
• Using generalist repositories
• Funder and institution data policies
• Data reporting standards
• Good practice for data-literature linking and data citation
Research Data Support Helpdesk – free advice and support

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
http://www.springernature.com/gp/group/data-policy

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Data Discovery Service
Actions Discovery Service
Permit upload of files up to 50GB via secure figshare portal Yes
Check for sensitive data/human identifiers Yes
Check to ensure files can be previewed in figshare Yes
Check to ensure all files described in metadata are present Yes
Generate DOI for the dataset Yes
Link the dataset to related article Yes
Apply relevant keywords Yes
Apply relevant categories Yes
Add funding information Yes
Copy-edit/improve title Yes
Check author list and order Yes
Enhance description Yes
Split or group files into meaningful collections Yes
Embargoed according to journal or funder policy Yes (where necessary)
Published in dedicated Springer Nature figshare repository Yes (when paper is accepted)

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Splitting or regrouping of data files – impact on original order
Suggested renaming of datasets
Administrative or biographical history is not included
Collection level relates to the journal which has published the associated manuscript
Context of the data – can be linked to the creator’s datasets
across the repository
Two levels of description are available
Data curation and archival approaches
Credit: Carolina Prysyazhnyuk

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Figshare platform for deposition

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
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The Research Data Alliance

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
A global, grassroots organisation focused on the
development of infrastructure and community activities
aimed to reduce barriers to data sharing and exchange
Nearly 6000 members from 129 countries
Members form working groups and interest groups
based on challenges identified by the community
Meet at 6-monthly plenary sessions (Montreal
September 2017, Berlin March 2018)
What is the Research Data Alliance?

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
An Interest Group for archivists and records managers

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Three current projects
• Preservation guidelines – drafting guidance on a tiered approach to digital
preservation for researchers.
• Appraisal literature review – collating existing information on data appraisal.
• Records management for the Research Data Alliance – helping to make consistent
policies to achieve better records management for RDA groups.
Mailing list to allow discussion between records professionals engaged in research data
management, and to allow other RDA members to request our assistance and feedback.
Aiming to support records professionals working in research data management and raise
the profile of records professionals and their expertise within the RDA community.
Join us! http://tinyurl.com/nyc24v6

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Records professionals and research data – a new role?
Thank you!
Email: rebecca.grant@springernature.com
research.data@springernature.com
Website: http://go.nature.com/ResearchDataServices
Twitter: @beck_grant
@springernature
These slides are licensed under a CC-BY-ND Creative Commons licence