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Celebrating Love Data Week: University of Leicester RDM toolkit

The University Library's research services team are celebrating International Love Data Week which runs from 10 - 14 February 2020. We support researchers and PhD students, in learning about effective data management practices, services and tools as well as how to organise your data, and advise on routes for data deposit, ensuring that, where feasible, you can make your research data outputs open, accessible, and discoverable for others to discover and reuse.

We are publishing a series of themed blog posts this week on a variety of research data management topics and we are of course always available for face-to-face research data consultations to chat about your research and data outputs, providing support for data management plans, outreach and advocacy within departments and colleges, and we provide and support the research data infrastructure Figshare at Leicester, for those who wish to deposit their data in our institutional data repository, when a disciplinary one is not available.



Image by Kellie Moss available at: https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.11568843, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

The hashtag for Love Data Week is #lovedata20 and our fourth post is an overview of the RDM tools and services available for Leicester's researchers.

In December 2019 we revised much of the content on our RDM website and relaunched with a new look and feel, and additional content https://www2.le.ac.uk/services/research-data. The refreshed content covers the basics of RDM good practice, guidance on ways to publish, share and cite research data, funder policies and requirements as well as an introduction and guidance on how  to use our institutional repository powered by Figshare.

Launched in Summer 2018 the University of Leicester Figshare-powered institutional research data repository can accommodate final project datasets or data underpinning publications. The University Library Research support team offers light touch curation of submitted datasets as well as consultancy and training on the use of our Figshare platform and promoting the research outputs. 

A significant activity that we do to help our researchers think about research data management across the research lifecycle is to provide advice and guidance at the grant application stage, particularly around data management plans (DMPs). The requirements for DMPs varies from funder to funder and are an integral part of grant applications. The DMP provides an outline of what type of research outputs will be generated during the project, how they will be managed during the active research phase and how/where/when do you plan to store, preserve and share the final dataset. RS Team offers bespoke consultancy to help shape the plans to meet funder expectations and we can help with periodical review of the DMP to reflect the progress of the project.

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) provide a useful collection of  of example data management and sharing plans, organised by research funders. They are available here.

Further information and contact details as usual are available on our RDM website.

Author: Dr Radek Pajor

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