I’ve had a busy week with not one, but two training sessions on RDM for OU researchers.
Getting to grips with research data management
The first took place last Wednesday – Getting to grips with research data management was an Early Bird Seminar organised by the Researcher Career Development team. This was well attended – 21 delegates came along from a range of different academic disciplines. As always, this session generated a lot of discussion, particularly on this occasion around the difficulties of gaining valid consent to share from vulnerable research participants. Slides from the session are available on the RDM intranet site, or to download here.
Yesterday I contributed to a session organised by the OpenSpace research centre and led by some of the fabulous experts from the Digital Curation Centre. The focus of this half-day workshop was on preparing data management plans for bids, and it was particularly useful to hear from Sarah Jones of the DCC about exactly what funders want to see in DMPs, with a focus on the requirements of AHRC and ESRC. Following an opportunity to review a couple of plans and discuss these in groups on our tables, I gave a short presentation about the support offered for Research Data Management at the OU. As ever, this was a great opportunity to highlight the developments happening in Library Services, RSQ and IT to deliver Research Data Management services. Slides from the session will be uploaded shortly to the OpenSpace event page. My slides are available to download here.
Keep an eye out for more training opportunities
There are more RDM training sessions in the pipeline, including a session for research managers and administrators on 30th June and a session for researchers in IET planned for September.
We’re also currently planning training for next year, so if you have any ideas or suggestions to how we can improve the current provision (or to tell us what we’re doing well!) please leave a comment below.