 |
 |
Ø Any ideas/tips/tricks/sharing of experience highly appreciated. A posting on the LSE blog this week gets to the some of the causes for the lack of quality in the datasets we're seeing in these early days of RDMS: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/06/02/reputation-instead-of-obligation-new-policies-to-motivate-academic-data-sharing/ "The commonly accepted metrics for academic performance (the journal citation index, the Hirsch index, and even altmetrics) are all based on research article publications. Data sharing, by contrast, receives almost no recognition" "if data sharing is mandatory, researchers only invest the minimum time necessary to share. This in turn leads to badly labeled variables, poor documentation, and datasets that are hard to find." Sound familiar? When talking to researchers here at Strathclyde I usually remind them that while we are here to support them as much as possible, the RDMS team are not subject specialists and it's really their responsibility to make their deposits as comprehensive as possible including a sufficient level of metadata even, as Robin mentions, if it means a basic readme.txt file. It's also worth stressing to them that their data will be made public and the quality of the data and documentation they deposit will ultimately be a reflection on their research and academic reputation. The inclusion of datasets in future REF evaluation, possibly to improve the star rating of publications, might go some way to improve the efforts researchers make with their data submissions. The only practical leverage we have at the moment is we will not mint a DOI or validate their dataset record in PURE until a minimum level of documentation is provided on deposit, that usually has the desired effect! Alan Alan Morrison Research Data Support Officer | Research Data Management & Sharing Project Research and Learning Support University of Strathclyde Level 5, Andersonian Library, Curran Building 101 St James Road Glasgow G4 ONS Tel: +44 (0) 141 548 4468 [THE_2014_email_sig]