If you collect, create, use or re-use data during your research, it’s important to make sure that your data management skills are up to scratch. Good research data management is necessary to ensure compliance with a number of funder policies, as well as the OU’s policy on research data management, but it can also positively impact your everyday working practice. By developing processes to store, describe, share and preserve your data you will see an improvement in efficiency and teamwork and may even spot connections in your data you might otherwise have missed.

Library Services run training sessions on Research Data Management throughout the year, but in the meantime if you want to improve your practice, or need a refresher on a certain aspect of data management why not try using MANTRA? This fantastic online training resource developed by the Data Library at the University of Edinburgh covers a range of topics relating to Research Data Management. Each module takes around 20 minutes to complete and is a great way to improve your knowledge at your own pace. Topics covered include:

• Data Management Plans
• Organising data
• File formats and transformation
• Documentation, metadata, citation
• Storage and security
• Data protection, rights and access
• Sharing, preservation and licensing
• Data handling in tutorials (in SPSS, R, ArcGIS and NVivo)

MANTRA is free for anyone to use at: http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/ 

 Whether you’re conducting interviews, collecting samples, creating software or analyzing texts, your research data is a valuable asset which should be managed properly and made publicly available alongside your other research outputs wherever possible.  This session will give an introduction to the basics of research data management: what it is, why it’s important and ways that you can embed research data management into your everyday working practice.

 This session is open to anyone who collects/creates/works with research data (academics, researchers, research students).

 Please enrol directly by using the Staff Learning Management System (LMS): http://staff-lms.open.ac.uk/staff-lms/  (Please note: LMS does not work well with Chrome).  Select ‘Search and register for scheduled learning events and waiting lists’, highlight ‘IET classes’, Look for code: IET/RC/EBS, Date: 03/06/15

If you are a part-time research student, please contact research-training-development@open.ac.uk

If you work with qualitative data, you may be interested in the rolling series of webinars which the UK Data Service will be running in 2015.

These will cover a range of topics including:

• Introduction to the UK Data Service
• Finding and Accessing data in the UK Data Service
• Getting started with re-using data
• Data management basics

See the UK Data Service event pages at  to book your place.