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As institutional RDM support services are getting better established, are any patterns emerging in which domains are taking them up? I changed the subject line as it has gone off the track of Gareth's question, and Tim Banks' point about the mismatch between active data and preservation file formats. The connection to my question is that while we can offer people task models and cost categories, I would guess researchers in some domains are more receptive than others to the idea that they could apply these models and checklist without radical changes to their practice. If you are involved in running an institutional RDM service are there any domain differences that stand out in your experience? (I'm thinking in terms of advice being followed up, through to stuff actually being offered for deposit somewhere) If so, what do think are the characteristics of those domains that bring researchers to engage with an institutional service? I'm prompted to ask by Norman's points below, which I recognise from case studies that I and others did a while back (e.g. for RIN and DCC SCARP projects). I came across work at that time by information scientist Jenny Fry. She looked at differences between domains in their "degree of production and use of scholarly networked digital resources" and found the best explanatory factors for success (or maturity may be a better word) in that were high 'mutual dependence' between researchers and low 'task uncertainty', with High Energy Physics being one example ( https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/11350) I think something similar works towards domains' capability to get their archiving and curation off the ground and more formalised. That was also my experience from case studies. Being faced with the issue of understanding a colleague from another domain's data and methods, and finding somewhere to store stuff, is a catalyst towards taking archiving seriously. And I can see Norman's 'eating your own dogfood' factor at work in how open notebook science has developed in physical sciences, e.g. Labtrove at Southampton. Hazarding a guess at which research groups would be best to proactively engage with, to build the take-up of an institutional data repository service, it would be in research groups that work in medium sized teams, have high data collection costs, and want to work more with either different kinds of data or researchers than they are used to dealing with. I'm guessing that researchers who work mostly individually, or with cheap and readily available source data, are least likely to deposit with the institution. I appreciate that individual project and personal factors might be just as important here as any characteristics of the domain. Either way, I'm interested to know what do you think? How diverse or otherwise is takeup of your RDM service? thanks, ANgus On 09/10/2014 21:15, Norman Gray wrote: > I think, however, there are a couple of high-level reasons _why_ this happens in these domains, which may be portable to other domains, with the same effect. > > First, because the data is produced, and after it's produced successively refined, by rather complicated processes, and because the people producing the data are often not the same as the people using it, the natural way for that data to be communicated is through an internal repository, rather than passed on from point to point or person to person. That requires an up-front investment of time, and a continuing investment of discipline, but it's a pretty efficient way to share material internally to the project, which obviously provides a very convenient starting point for later archiving. > > Second, another way of thinking about that is 'dogfooding', as in 'eating ones own dogfood' (computer scientists seem to talk about this a lot). If a project is intended to provide resources for the wider community -- data, services, catalogues, whatever -- then if the project takes a deliberate decision to do its _own_ work only using the final public interfaces rather than using any project-only routes, then there's a _very_ strong pressure to make those interfaces as usable and as useful as possible. The result will probably turn into a more naturally archivable product. > > One point we were making in the document I quoted was that an approach like this means that the 'archiving' costs can be subsumed into an 'infrastructure' budget line. That might make them less prominent and so less 'cuttable'. > > I have slight tunnel vision on this, of course, and as Tim Banks explained, sometimes working formats are unavoidably different from archival formats. But if 'archiving' can be reconceived as a adjunct to another process in a project, one way or another -- as opposed to an annoying, expensive, and forgettable external obligation -- then I suspect that will often be both more effective and cheaper. > > Best wishes, > > Norman > > -- Dr Angus Whyte Senior Institutional Support Officer Digital Curation Centre University of Edinburgh Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE +44-131-650-9986 * New book * - Delivering Research Data Management Services; Fundamentals of good practice, by Graham Pryor, Sarah Jones and Angus Whyte, editors. Facet Publishing. http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=9337 The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.