Research Data Management

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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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