New! Research Data Catalogue

This post was originally posted on The Orb, the Open University’s open research blog, by Isabel Chadwick, Research Data Management Librarian at the Open University

Swiss Army knife

The Research Data Management project is working to build a suite of tools which will enable OU researchers to manage, share, publish and archive their research data. I am pleased to announce that the first tool in this suite, the Research Data Catalogue is now live.

The Research Data Catalogue is facilitated by a new item type – “Research Dataset Record” – in ORO, the OU’s institutional repository. At this stage, ORO can only accept records which describe research datasets (what they are and how they can be accessed) the datasets themselves should not be deposited in ORO.

This will benefit both OU researchers and the university as a whole by:

  • Enabling researchers to comply with funder policies and expectations for Research Data Management
  • Providing a means to link research publications to their underlying data
  • Increasing the visibility of OU research
  • Facilitating faster responses to Freedom of Information requests
  • Allowing the University to monitor the creation of research data in order to provide support to researchers at key points during the research data lifecycle
tower

Our first record…

In December Dr Ann Grand, Research Associate on the Catalyst project, created the first research data record in ORO. This has enabled the project team to include a link to the ORO record in the data access statement for a publication which they have submitted to the journal PLOS One.

A number of funders (including RCUK) and publishers require a data access statement to be included in publications. Following the Catalyst project’s example and linking to an ORO data record in this statement will help you to ensure that the access details remain updated.