Libby, yes I agree with your point that RDM-related studies that are funded as research ought to be following the good research practice advice we dish out to researchers. I don't think that being rigorous as a practitioner necessarily means being rigorous in the same way as a researcher, but the 'eat your own dogfood' principle is a good one and I agree we don't always follow it as much as we would like. In that old Scots saying 'cobbler's bairns are aye the worst shod' - the cobbler's kids have the worst shoes!

Some form of RDM related repository might be a good idea, though we can also use general purpose repositories, and those of our institutions. To answer Ben's question in DCC's case we use the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Bath IR's for publication outputs, (though not consistently) and the DCC website is archived. For the DCC's 2014 survey of UK institutional RDM service development we deposited the data and reports etc in Zenodo (here), and we could have used others like Figshare of course.

I can see a good case for RDM repositories to serve specific practitioner needs. For example in the case of Data Asset Framework studies of researchers' data management practices and support requirements, we have an idea proposed in Jisc's current Research Data Spring programme for a Question Bank repository. That's aiming to meet practitioner needs for support in identifying questions, questionnaires, interviews, reports and related material that others have found useful, which they can reuse locally in interactions with researchers. I know similar ideas are being explored for Data Curation Profiles in an IMLS project we're in touch with.

best wishes,

Angus



On 21/01/2015 23:41, Ben Green wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">

That's a great question Libbie.

 

I guess for a lot of us, our job is primarily to help disseminate the knowledge and supporting data created by academics, through their research activities, and that is of course a good thing. Technically, there's nothing stopping a University from using its institutional repository to publish articles created by its professional/administrative staff (who can get their own ORCID ID if they want), and assigning those articles DOIs. I'm certainly not condoning this at my institution, but in theory, its possible.

 

Perhaps another approach is for a national centre of excellence, e.g. DCC or JISC for the UK, to host a repository for 'non-academic' publications. Both organisations do already publish great articles and data objects such as spreadsheets/tables created by their own staff, and via contributions from partner HE institutes. I think at present such articles/objects only have the non-persistent URLs for their respective web pages, for example those found at:

 

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/publications/2014

 

I'd be interested to know what the DCC's view is, as I think some of their members do publish academic articles at their respective HE institutions as well as professional guidance on their own DCC website.

 

Ben. 

 

Ben Green | Research Data Management Service - Technical Manager | The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PP | Tel: 0161 275 8707 | [log in to unmask] | http://www.manchester.ac.uk/researchdata

**Please note – I work Tuesdays, Wednesday mornings and Fridays**

From: Research Data Management discussion list [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Libbie Stephenson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 21 January 2015 20:14
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: following best practices

I have an inquiry on how we as professionals should follow the data sharing practices we wish to impose on researchers.  I have open on my desktop several very interesting studies produced by practitioners, major organizations, and major archives.  The studies all report on data that was collected to produce the report.  But nowhere is there any link to the actual data.  Sometimes there is a questionnaire and often there are tables, but no actual data.  If I write to the author I can sometimes get a dataset, but very often there simply isn't one to share. Shouldn't we be following the same practices that we expect of researchers? 

So, I wonder if we need to do a better job of making sure we produce well documented, shared datasets with persistent identifiers, located in a trusted repository and linked to any publications. Yes, it is a lot of work but if we are telling researchers to do this then I think we have to step up our game.

Is there a need for an archive or repository of practitioner/profession related data? Thoughts?

--
Libbie Stephenson, Director
UCLA Social Science Data Archive
University of California, Los Angeles
Box 951484
Los Angeles, CA. 90095-1484
310-825-0716
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http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/da

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-- 
Dr Angus Whyte
Senior Institutional Support Officer
Digital Curation Centre
University of Edinburgh
Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
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