On Tuesday 23rd June CREST Research Leads met in the Universities UK Boardroom at Woburn House to discuss the ongoing JISC-funded project and Stage 1 report: ‘A consortia-based approach to building an integrated research data management system’.

As future steps, it was agreed that the case studies outlined in the attached are going to be very useful to institutions as they develop their RDMS capacity. It was also agreed that the Research Leads are very happy for CREST and the project team to propose additional work to JISC with the hope of securing funding for Stage 2. Discussion suggested that there is an appetite for institutions to continue to discuss streamlined commercial options, using the LTU Pure case study as a template. Simultaneously, institutions are interested in working with Arkivum and ULCC to begin to integrate and refine workflows with the view of building a consortia-based system around Eprints and Arkivum. Research Leads were also very happy to support UCA / RDIVA’s work on improving EPrints for Art and Design specialist and looking at how this will inform work on research data archive for non-text based subjects, as this is very important to a number of members and their respective researchers. There is also interest in Arkivum’s work on extending CRIS systems like Pure to integrate in the research data archive.

Research Leads are now looking at a variety of workflow options and considering how to refine these. The project team is also finalising their three case studies and the introductory report. All material and reports produced by the project team will be published on Figshare and on CREST Collections in July, and the group will attend the JISC ‘Research at Risk’ sandpit event at Imperial College London on the 13th and 14th of July to present on Stage 1 of the project and discuss plans for Stage 2.

Many thanks to all members of the project team and to the Research Leads for your enthusiasm and support – and your excellent (ongoing) work and feedback. Watch this space…