Posted by j.laird on 15 July 2021 - 10:00am

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

By Johanna Walker, University of Southampton.

As part of a project for the Arts and Humanities Research Council we’re mapping policies and mechanisms provided by UKRI and other funders and stakeholders to support and promote digital skills in Arts and Humanities research. We’re starting with the research council data policies that outline how the data generated or collected during the performance of grant-supported research should be managed, preserved and, where appropriate, shared.  

Our initial findings are as shown in the table below. Now we’re interested in what we didn’t find. Is there some missing guidance or tools that our process did not discover – perhaps there is some other form of support that does not fit under ‘guidance’ or ‘tools’ that our process overlooked entirely. If you know of a relevant policy, guidance or tool – or, to channel Donald Rumsfeld – an ‘unknown unknown’, we’d love to hear about it.

To identify those polices and supporting guidance, we set ourselves the following protocol: we could find the information by navigating on the individual research councils themselves, by Google searching (using natural terms such as ‘does the ESRC have a data management template’) and by mailing the councils directly.

Organisation	Policy	Guidance	Template	Tools
AHRC	UKRI Open Research	DMP Outline UKRI Best Practice of Management of Research Data	No	Research Data Management Toolkit (JISC) Suggests DCC and DPC
BBSRC	Data Sharing Policy	In Policy Statement on Good Scientific Practice Resources for Data Sharing	No
ESRC	Research Data Policy	UK Data Servce  UK Data Archive Peer Reviewers Guidance.	No
EPSRC	Policy Framework on Research Data	Clarification of ESPRC expectations of research management	No
Innovate UK	None		No
MRC	Data Sharing Policy	Guidance and Standards for data management, preservation etc DMP Guidance	Yes
NERC	Data Policy	Guidance for ODMP	Outline & Full (docx)	Data Service assists in creating DMP
Research England	None
STFC	Scientific Data Policy	Data Management Plan	No	Suggests DCC

 

We’re aware that a lot of the work of finding and presenting these policies and guidelines has already been done by various Research and Innovation or Libraries and Information teams in a number of well-established universities, and some of this can be found very easily on the first page of results of a Google search (in fact, googling ‘does the ESPRC require a data management plan’ returns a first result from the University of Bath). However, we chose not to rely on these sources, instead only using documents we could find on the actual Research Council sites themselves.

This was for two reasons: firstly, it’s plausible that there is an imbalance between the grant-support provision of larger, more research-intensive universities, and smaller, more focused or non-university institutions. Therefore, it was important that we looked for the information sources to which any and all applicants might have access. Secondly, even though there are a number of universities that provide much information and many exemplar templates, we (and other potential applicants who are not at those institutions) can’t hold them responsible for providing the most up to date or accurate information. For that, we need to go to the primary source.

We’ll update our list of data policies with any feedback we receive in a further blog post. The results of this work will feed into a far more substantial project to understand the prevalence of digital skills in Arts and Humanities, which will be published as a report early in 2022.