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Research data services

Library services and resources are continually reviewed to ensure that they meet your needs as a researcher. If you have further suggestions on how we can help meet your research needs, please contact Rebecca Parker, Research Services Librarian.

In 2011, Swinburne Library and Swinburne Research worked on a joint project funded by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative. This project aims to develop the infrastructure at Swinburne to help support you in managing your research-related data.

 

What is this project?

What is research data?

For purposes of this project, and for developing data services for researchers at Swinburne, we’ve adopted a comprehensive definition of research data (derived from several definitions of data that have been compiled by ANDS, here).  Research data can be any of the inputs to—and results from—research and scholarly inquiry.  Data can be facts or observations that support a theory or test a hypothesis, and may arise from experiments, observations, or computations.  These can be raw data or the product of further analysis.  Data may be text, numbers, images, sounds, artefacts, specimens or samples, and may exist in digital or nondigital formats.  Provenance information about the data—how, when and where it was collected, and with what type of instrument—may be an essential component for understanding the data. The software code or model used to generate or analyse the data may also comprise a complete description of the data.

Under the Australian Code of Conduct for Responsible Research, there is some expectation that research data will be retained beyond the life of a project to ensure the integrity of the research. It is also becoming more common for major publishers to expect to view or even publish the data associated with a journal article. Nature is at the vanguard of this movement (here is one example; follow the link to "supplementary information"). Many research disciplines offer a different model for storing data and making it available to other researchers. In the area of earth and environmental sciences, for example, PANGAEA provides a venue for archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. Here is a sample record from PANGAEA of a dataset that is supplemental to a journal article published elsewhere, with persistent links between the article and the supplemental data.

A 2009 editorial in Nature ("Data's shameful neglect") highlights the importance of promoting openness and sharing of research data. More recently, a series of articles from the 11 Feb 2011 issue of Science was devoted to the challenges and opportunities of confronting the data deluge ("Dealing with data"). A 2011 article in PLoS ONE, "Data Sharing by Scientists: Practices and Perceptions" describes findings from an international survey of data practices. A new online open-access journal, GigaScience 'aims to revolutionize data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use' by employing a publication format 'that links standard manuscript publication with an extensive database that hosts all associated data and provides data analysis tools and cloud-computing resources.' More information about this ambitious project is available from the GigaBlog.

What is ANDS?

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is a DIISR-funded initiative created to establish best practice in issues of data management and curation, including research data ownership and the roles and responsibilities associated with ownership; access to research data collected and maintained with public funding; and the curation of experimental, research and published data. Many Australian universities have been provided with ANDS funding to assist them in identifying and describing local research datasets. In March 2011, The Australian published a brief article about Swinburne's ANDS-funded research data management project.

 

How can the Library help me with managing and promoting my research data?

How do I make my research data discoverable?

The Library expects to make records for Swinburne-created research datasets available alongside your publication records in Swinburne Research Bank. This will provide you with a citable profile for your research data and publications, and records will also be indexed by Research Data Australia, a national database of research datasets from Australian universities and research institutes. This website is expected to be a valuable future resource for researchers to assist them in discovering more about Australian research data, and in building networks between researchers, projects, data and publications. For more information, see the ANDS Data Connections Strategy (PDF).

How do I create a data management plan?

In support of Swinburne's forthcoming data management policy document, Management of research data and primary materials (to be finalised in 2011), the Library has developed some preliminary resources to assist you with data management planning. We would appreciate your feedback on these resources, which continue to be a work in progress.

This checklist takes you through the components of an effective data management plan. If you address each item accurately, your answers will form the basis of a data management plan for your research project. Upon successful completion of the checklist, you should keep a copy along with other research project documentation.

We acknowledge prior work done at Monash, QUT and the University of Melbourne in creating data management checklists, and we appreciate their willingness to allow us to draw from their work in preparing Swinburne's checklist.

If you would like more help, there is also a range of comprehensive data management plan development tools and checklists available from other organisations and universities:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) now requires data management plans in all grant proposals submitted to the agency. The NSF states that the requirements for specfic datasets will be "determined by the community of interest and subject to the process of peer review and program management" within the NSF.  Responses to some frequently asked questions on data management and sharing offers some guidance regarding the NSF's expectations for data management. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also requires applicants seeking funds in excess of $500,000 to submit a plan for data sharing. See additional information concerning the NIH's data sharing policy here, with further guidance available here, including key elements of a data sharing plan (with examples).

 

What else do I need to know about research data?

What data should I keep?

Not all research data can, or should, be saved.  But it can be difficult to discern what data has potential future value, not only for your own research program or for other researchers within your discipline, but also for researchers in other disciplines who may discover new uses for your data.

What about copyright?

There are a number of issues concerning intellectual property and copyright in research data. ANDS provides some information in the guide Copyright and data. For more detailed information, please contact the Swinburne Copyright office.

Where can I store my data?

There are already a number of national storage sites and disciplinary archives for storing research data, including the Australian Research Collaboration Scheme (ARCS)'s Data Fabric. More information will be available here when Swinburne's data management policy is finalised, but we would also like to know what would be useful to you in assisting with the management of your research-related data.

 

Where can I go to find other people's research data?

Where can I find government data?

Government data is often freely available online. Here is a selection of useful resources:

Where can I find data from NGOs and international agencies?

Non-governmental organizations and international agencies also offer free online access to their data. Here is small sample that may be useful to researchers:

Where can I find data (and deposit data) relevant to my research discipline?

Some disciplines already have a practice of sharing data with their colleagues. Here is a small selection from the wide range of online discipline-specific and multidisciplinary resources, many of which allow researchers to deposit their own data:

For a more comprehensive list of repositories and databases for open data, see this Open Access Directory.

Where can I find research data produced by other universities?

Many universities have already created public-use archives for storing and sharing data that have been generated by their researchers. Here is a selection of these:

 

Where can I go for more information?

Who else is working on this?

Many Australian universities have been funded by ANDS to develop research data management tools. If you'd like to see what others are doing, here are some research data projects at other institutions (Australian and elsewhere):

What data processing tools are available to me?

The Australian Research Collaboration Scheme (ARCS) offers a suite of data services, including data storage; data sharing among collaborators, with controlled access to data; and data transfer. An extensive list of data visualisation tools is posted at the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki. Additional data visualisation resources are also listed at the University of Wisconsin's research data services site. For a web-based data cleanser and analyser, you can try Needlebase. A review of Needlebase is available from ReadWriteWeb.

 

Contact us

There are still a number of issues around research data that we need to think about, such as copyright, ownership of intellectual property, confidentiality, ethics, data storage, and more. We would really appreciate your assistance with this. If you would like to help, please contact us on researchdata@swin.edu.au, or directly:

 

Rebecca Parker
Research Services Librarian
rparker@swin.edu.au
+61 3 9214 4806