Oxford research data blog

Research Data Oxford’s induction resources have received a bit of a facelift, ready for the start of the new academic year.

These resources are designed to provide a brief overview of key research data management issues, and are suitable for use in induction sessions for new researchers, including postgraduate research students.

You can find the resources here:

https://researchdata.ox.ac.uk/induction/

The University’s Information Security Team has published a really useful article providing simple guidance for Oxford researchers.  This article reminds us about the importance of securing information, provides help on assessing its sensitivity, and describes the three levels of confidentiality that researchers should use when labelling information. We highly recommend it, and indeed the entire InfoSec site which is full of practical guidance on keeping your data safe!

The Research File Service (RFS) project is looking at potential systems to provide University of Oxford researchers with secure, affordable, scalable storage for active research data.

The scope and requirements for RFS were initially gathered in 2018, and then updated in early 2020 following a previous proof-of-concept phase. With changes following the pandemic, and potential new ways of working being introduced, the RFS project is seeking to identify the requirements that are now most important to researchers.

Oxford researchers (and others interested in the service) are therefore invited to complete this questionnaire:

https://forms.office.com/r/esDmqDjPL5

The questionnaire will remain available until Tuesday 31 August 2021. It should take between 10 and 15 minutes to complete.

Should you have any questions, please get in touch with the RFS Project Manager, Shireen Walker <shireen.walker@it.ox.ac.uk>.

We are happy to announce that the University now has a new opt-in service offering secure storage and management of electronic records and digital objects. Interested parties are invited to sign up now.

The University of Oxford Digital Archive Service (‘DigiSafe’) has been established in response to a recognized need among colleges and departments for a secure, affordable system for storage, management, and long-term preservation of digital material. Subscribing units get access to a cloud-based platform, supplied by Libnova, which offers storage and tools for secure and compliant data preservation.

Key features

• Long-term archiving (10+ years) of infrequently accessed material;
• 100% data integrity with four copies of all files;
• Secure lifecycle from upload to long-term storage;
• Simple upload/download facility (‘drag-and-drop’);
• Easy access to archived files, with ability to quickly pre-view the material;
• Simple workflows for non-archival specialists as well as advanced functions for professional archival use;
• Customisable retention schedules and workflows for managing personal and sensitive data;
• Scalable and flexible to fit the needs of different departments;
• Approved by Information Security for use with all kinds of data, including confidential.

The Libnova platform was chosen after a procurement process involving representatives from Colleges, IT Services, Bodleian Libraries, Departments, and the national Digital Preservation Consortium. The aim was to identify a secure system for long-term preservation of digital objects that is easy to use, flexible, and affordable. The platform has been approved by the University Information Security Team for storage of all kinds of data, including confidential material.

Pricing

The service is now being made available to University departments and colleges. Annual subscriptions, including 1 TB of data storage, cost £2,500 for the 2020/21 financial year, charged from 1 Aug 2020. Additional storage can be requested. The 2020/21 price includes on-boarding and training in July.

More information

For further details, please visit the DigiSafe information site. Do contact the service manager (digisafe@it.ox.ac.uk, phone: 01865 283 686) if you have any questions, or if you want to discuss what joining the service would mean for you.

A review of the University of Oxford’s research data management arrangements is currently underway. This is intended to look at how we work here at Oxford, with a view to informing development of services, support, and infrastructure.

As part of this, we are seeking input from researchers at all career stages (including postgraduate research students). We’d like to know your views on what is currently provided by the University, and the extent to which this meets your needs. Please help us by completing our research data management review survey:

https://oxford.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/research-data-management-review-survey

This is your opportunity to influence future investment and provision in this area.

The survey is being managed by Research Consulting and Charles Beagrie on behalf of the University of Oxford. It will remain open until 20 March 2020.

It is anticipated that users will be unable to deposit research outputs to the Oxford Research Archive (ORA), including ORA-Data, from 20 January for up to a week. This temporary interruption is required in order to perform important system updates.

General enquiries relating to ORA can be sent to ora@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. For queries specific to the deposit of research data, contact David Tomkins: david.tomkins@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

We all know that research at Oxford generates publications, but increasingly the underlying data is becoming a crucial research output as well. Keeping and sharing research data helps demonstrate reproducibility, it enables data science and it enhances our academic profile via the rising importance of data journals. Oxford has been at the forefront of thinking in this area for many years and adopted one of the UK’s first institutional research data management policies (Policy on the Management of Research Data and Records) back in 2012.

IT Services and the Libraries worked closely with Research Services to help them draft that first policy, and again over 2017-18 we have worked with our colleagues around the University to update the policy and fit it to the rapidly changing world of research data management and sharing. Staff from our Research Support Service – aided by our fantastic intern Marcella Meehan – reviewed the policy alongside policies published by other universities and research organisations since 2012. We also interviewed twenty Oxford researchers and administrators to see how our policy could be clearer and easier to use. As in 2012, we worked with the Libraries and Research Services to draft the new policy and navigate it through a series of University committees. Finally, in early December 2018, just in time for Christmas, Research and Innovation Committee approved the new Policy on the Management of Data Supporting Research Outputs (note the new title).

So what has changed?

• Principal Investigators are now given an explicit role in ensuring that researchers whom they manage comply with the policy;
• The definition of data covered by the policy has been expanded to include data necessary for legal/regulatory compliance;
• The role of researchers in helping ensure good IP management and personal data management has been emphasised;
• ORA-Data is now specifically mentioned as a suitable repository for Oxford data and metadata;
• The name of the policy has been changed to clarify that researchers’ responsibilities relate primarily to research data used to support publications and other public outputs
• The University has accepted an additional ‘catch-all’ responsibility to help researchers with policy compliance where its standard training, support and infrastructure do not answer a researcher’s specific data management needs;
• General redrafting to improve clarity by, for example, incorporating footnotes into the main text and making nested responsibilities into separate points;

In general the revision has been aimed at making what was previously implicit explicit. For example the 2012 policy asked researchers to be responsible for data being “kept in a manner that is compliant with legal obligations…” In the revised policy, there is greater detail on what these legal obligations might actually be, including GDPR-related personal data compliance, abiding by the terms of legal contracts and funding agreements, and keeping track of intellectual property generated by research.

The Research Data Oxford team, comprising staff from the Libraries, Research Services and IT Services, are committed to supporting Oxford researchers with policy compliance, and helping them achieve the maximum impact with the data that their research generates. The University’s commitment to this support is also now explicitly referenced in the revised policy, making clear that good management of research data is best achieved when we all work together. If you have any questions about the revised policy, or need help with your own research data, please get in touch by emailing researchdata@ox.ac.uk.

On 3 December 2018, the University of Oxford’s Research and Innovation Committee approved a new research data policy.

This policy, the Policy on the Management of Data Supporting Research Outputs, supersedes and replaces the earlier Policy on the Management of Research Data and Records, which had been in place since 2012.

The LabArchives electronic lab notebook service is now available to all members of the University of Oxford.

Electronic lab notebooks provide a digital alternative to the paper notebooks used by many scientists. An electronic system has many potential benefits, including increased searchability, easier collaboration, and the ability to access research records via any internet connection. LabArchives also offers secure storage for research data files.

For details of how to register and access the service, please visit the LabArchives help pages. Any queries can be sent to researchdata@ox.ac.uk.