FOCUS AREAS

SURF stimulates ICT innovation in higher education and research in these focus areas:

Support Infrastructure Models for Research Data Management (SIM4RDM)

Scholarly Communication
Status: Current

SURF participates in the two year FP7 project SIM4RDM.

The vision of SIM4RDM is to enable researchers to effectively utilise the emerging data infrastructures by ensuring that they have the knowledge, skills and support infrastructures necessary to adopt good research data management methodologies.

SIM4RDM will achieve this by analysing existing funding programme interventions within member states and internationally, and producing models, evaluation frameworks and policy recommendations for both future national interventions as well as pan-European and International co-ordination.

Deliverables
The purpose of the SIM4RDM project will be to co-ordinate actions across the EU and also involve other international stakeholders to:

Share knowledge and experience in building the support infrastructures and encouraging research data management practice in the form of models for national programmes and evaluation frameworks.
Determine required National, pan-European and International level interventions which can be implemented by programme owners and managers.
Determine models for co-ordinating such interventions to ensure maximum impact.
Establish evaluation frameworks for measuring the impact of these interventions.
Implement and pilot the intervention model and evaluation framework.
Build international consensus on long term strategy and policy.

SURF is leading the work package ‘Evidence Gathering’ to produce a landscape study of interventions already in place or planned for improving research data management skills, support and capacity.
This work package will determine what funding programmes and funding interventions are already being used across different member states and in other international countries to improve capacity and skills of researchers to make effective use of the research data infrastructures and to evaluate those interventions. It will undertake a landscape analysis to determine what programme owners are already considering or have in place to improve the skills and capacities of researchers to manage research data and use research data infrastructures.

Background
Good research data management practice is essential for both productive research and for taking full advantage of the emergent data infrastructures. Whilst, there are established practices in the management and referencing of publications, similar standards for the management of data are currently sporadic, with some disciplines better organised than others.

Typically publications do not include the underlying data upon which their conclusions are based and the data is not accessible. Effective management of research data is critical for generating economic and scientific advances as well as for the preservation of this capital for future generations.

To date most data infrastructure activities at national and international levels tend to concentrate on the technical developments needed for both large and small scale data infrastructures or on technical standards for data management and data referencing.

Within the Netherlands, SURF has coordinated different studies on access to research data within the SURFshare programme.

Project manager: Marc Dupuis