Imperial College London is committed to promoting the highest standards of academic research, including excellence in research data management. This includes a robust digital curation infrastructure that supports open data access and protects confidential data.
Imperial acknowledges legal, ethical and commercial constraints on data sharing and the need to preserve the academic entitlement to publication.
Support and guidance on Research Data Management can now be found on the Library's Scholarly Communication webpages.
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In order to foster best practice in data management, the College is supporting its academic and research community by developing services and infrastructure; and guidance in: data management planning, data storage, data deposit and data discoverability. Further details are available as below:
Research Data Management (RDM) is championed within the College by the Research Office with key services provided by the Library's Scholarly Communications Team.
The Provost has overall responsibility for RDM working with an RDM Group which has been has been meeting regularly since Autumn 2013 with the following Terms of Reference and membership - RDM_WG_ToR_Membership [pdf]) approved by the Provost Board.
Research Data Management is comprised of a complex set of varied but related activities. Support and responsibility for these activities is shared across a number of College departments as below:
- The Research Office - Developing and maintaining the Research Data Management Policy
- The Library - The Scholarly Communications Team provides key services and training.
- ICT - Provide repositories and data storage advice.
In 2014, the Vice-Provost, Research, approved an allocation of £100K for academically-driven projects to identify and generate exemplars of best practice in RDM, specifically frameworks and prototypes that would comply with key funder RDM policies and the College position. The call for projects outlined that frameworks could be based either on original ideas or integrating existing solutions into the research process, improving its efficacy or the breadth of its usage. There was an expectation that solutions would support open access for data; solutions that supported Open Innovation were strongly encouraged.
Six projects were funded, covering different disciplines, faculties and research areas. The projects ran for six months, finishing at the end of 2014. Project reports are made available below. A presentation summarising the programme is available via Slideshare (Green Shoots: Research Data Management Pilot at Imperial College London; presentation given at the International Digital Curation Conference, London 2015, by Ian McArdle and Torsten Reimer).
A Computational Molecular Data Notebook
(M. Bearpark)
- Generating a prototype notebook that will enable computational molecular researchers to easily share a curated subset of their results and document how they were generated. Read the project report: Imperial RDM - Haystack [pdf]
The Imperial College Tissue Bank: A Searchable Catalogue for Tissues, Research Projects and Data Outcomes: Thomas_RDM_Presentation [Powerpoint]
(G. Thomas, S. Butcher, C. Tomlinson)
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Extending the ICH tissue bank infrastructure to accept and catalog research data alongside the sample collection. Read the project report: Imperial RDM - Tissue Bank [pdf]
Integrated Rule-Based Data Management System for Genome Sequencing Data: Mueller_RDM_Presentation [pdf]
(M. Mueller, J. Ferrer)
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Setting up a data management system for the DNA sequencing service in the NIHR Imperial BRC Genomics Facility that will integrate with existing central Imperial HPC infrastructure for processing, analysis and dissemination of raw data and analysis results. Read the project report: Imperial RDM - Genome Sequencing [pdf]
Research Data Management in Computational and Experimental Molecular Science
(H. S. Rzepa, M. J. Harvey, N. Mason, A. Mclean)
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Addressing sustainability and scalability of a hub interfacing electronic lab notebooks with HPC resources and digital data repositories. Read the project report: Imperial RDM - Molecular Sciences [pdf]
Research Data Management: Where Software Meets Data
(G. Gorman, C. Jacobs, A. Avdis)
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Integrating research data management into the research workflow so that data and software can be curated at the push of a button using Figshare and GitHub. Read the project report: Imperial RDM - Software [pdf]
Time Series Green Shoots Project
(Nick Jones)
- Enhancing a time series web-resource so that users can upload and compare time series data and methods. Read the project report: Imperial RDM - Time Series [pdf]
The documents on this page may not be fully accessible. To request a fully accessible version, please email ro.managementinfo@imperial.ac.uk
Notice
Some of the content of these RDM-related pages is copied or adapted from guidance previously generated by various sources including
Their expertise is much appreciated