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Celebrating Love Data Week: UoL and Figshare for data

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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. 
Image by Emily Castels from the Images of Research Collection https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.7976873.v2
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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.

 The hashtag for Love Data Week is #lovedata20 and our first post is a brief reflection on the first year of our RDM service since the launch of our Figshare-powered data repository.
Celebrating 18 Months of the UoL Research Data Repository 
Almost a year and a half ago we posted an announcement about the launch of our shiny brand new, Figshare-powered institutional research data repository. This announcement was a checkered flag to, and the culmination of, a substantial two year institutional RDM project, which included a series of research data pathfinder interviews across all disciplines and experience of researcher, from PhD to PI, advocacy and training, and finally a 8 month 'competitive dialogue' EU tender and procurement exercise. Figshare were awarded the contract and after significant user testing we finally launched the platform for showcasing our UoL research data outputs.

Since the launch of the service we have curated and made openly available over 75 research data deposits totalling more than 60GB of research data. Items available through the UoL data repository were viewed over 20000 times and downloaded over 2500 times.  
 
Throughout the 18 months of service we have had the pleasure of interacting with many different exciting research projects, either via contributing to the development of data management plans, identifying suitable data repositories, and finally by assisting with the deposit of the final data outputs.

An example of one of most interesting projects which resulted in a UoL Figshare collection of a funded project's research outputs (research data and publications) was the 'Beyond the Gaze' project by Professor Teela Sanders (https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.c.4737575) focusing on working practices of online sex workers in UK.  

We are excited to work with our postgraduate students to facilitate data deposits to accompany their thesis, with appendices containing data underpinning the research. An example of this was working with Dr Rachael Sycamore's dataset on Romano-British metalwork hoarding (https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.7687406). We also enhanced our training portfolio offering in the area of RDM and data sharing in 2019/2020, with sessions specifically for PhD students as part of the researcher development programme of the Doctoral College.

We also assisted with facilitating the deposit of the supplementary data of Dr Katherine Zoe Herrity's collection of prison sounds (https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.7628846.v1) which became an interactive part of the thesis to enhance the reader experience. 

We have also found that colleagues from other professional services have found a use for the data repository. For example, Thomas Moore regularly updates the collection of UoL Open Access Block Grant expenditure at UoL (https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.c.4555571). 

It was an exciting 18 months and we are very much looking forward to hearing from you and to help make your data discoverable at https://leicester.figshare.com/ .

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

Authors: Dr Radek Pajor and Laurian Williamson
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