If data is loved so much, why is so much of it running around loose, dirty and in no fit state to get a job?

Librarians have grown to love research data so much they can’t get enough of it! Well some at least have, and Love Your Data Week will help spread the love. Of course nobody loves data more than the researchers who produce it. Funders love it too; after all they pay for it to come into the world. If data is loved so much, why is so much of it running around loose, dirty and in no fit state to get a job? Is all that is needed a little more discipline?

Three years ago when Delivering Research Data Management Services was first published, my co-authors Graham Pryor and Sarah Jones were working with colleagues in the Digital Curation Centre and in universities across the UK to help them get support for research data off the ground and into the roster of institutional service development. At the time, as Graham said in his introduction, institution-wide RDM services had “at last begun to gain a foothold”.

The (now open access) chapter titled “a pathway to sustainable research data services: from scoping to sustainability”described six phases, from envisioning and initiating, through discovering requirements, to design, implementation and evaluation.  Across the UK sector as a whole, few institutions had got beyond the discovery phase. Some of the early adopters in the UK, US and Australia have case studies featured in the book, providing more fully-fledged examples of the mix of soft and hard service components that a ‘research data management service’ typically comprises. Broadly these include support for researchers to produce Data Management Plans, tools and storage infrastructure for managing active data, support for selection and handover to a suitable repository for long-term preservation, and support for others to discover what data the institution has produced.

So what has changed? The last three years have seen evolution, consolidation and growth. According to one recent survey of European academic research libraries almost all will be offering institutional RDM services within two years.[1] The mantra of FAIR data (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) has spurred a flurry of data policy-making by funders, journals and institutions.[2] Many organisations have yet to adopt one,but policy harmonisation is now a more pressing need than formulation. Data repositories have mushroomed, with re3data.org now listing about three times the number it did three years ago. Training materials and courses are becoming pervasive, and data stewardship is increasingly recognised as essential to data science.