Learn to cost, plan, manage and share social science data effectively

There are still places available for Planning, Appraising, Ingesting and Documenting Social Science Data, a one-day workshop at the UK Data Archive (University of Essex, Colchester) on 27 November 2013.

When it comes to dealing with the ever increasing commitments of research data, the UK Data Service continues to see institutions struggle with the challenges of domain specificity, in particular, how to treat social science data.

How do we help our local researchers cost, plan and manage social science data effectively and following best practice? How do we then appraise, ingest, curate and make accessible that mixed bag of data that a social scientist might have created? How can we effectively demonstrate the impact of sharing?

In this workshop UKDS will showcase our collaborative support and training materials that are being used to support:

• research support staff who face dealing with ensuring compliance with data management responsibilities set out in almost all research applications (as well as persuading them it's the right thing to do)
• institutional repository managers now charged with appraising, ingesting, describing and managing social science research data created by local academics.

The day includes hands-on work getting your hands dirty with data!

The workshop is best suited for those who are actively working with storing and sharing data for use in social science research, or plan to in the near future. This course is unlikely to be suitable for undergraduate or postgraduate students unless working specifically in a data archiving environment.

Course fees include all workshop materials plus refreshments and lunch:

· £30 for UK students

· £60 for UK academic staff (including research centres), ESRC researchers, voluntary and public sectors staff
· £150 for commercial and international participants

For a full programme and booking information: http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/news-and-events/eventsitem/?id=3556

Data Management Costing Tool

The UK Data Archive has recently developed an activity-based data management costing tool for the social sciences. The pilot version has been made available for testing, and your feedback would be appreciated.


The tool and background information on how it was developed are available at: http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/planning-for-sharing/costing

The UKDA is interested to know how useful and practical this simple tool would be for researchers and data managers when preparing research applications and/or data management plans. We also want your view on the tool's approach to costing data management, and suggestions for improvements and additions.

Feedback and comments can be sent to datasharing@data-archive.ac.uk until 20 May 2011.

The tool's approach is to measure the additional costs – above standard research procedures and practices – that are needed to make research data shareable beyond the primary research team. The tool is based on identifying all applicable data management activities and steps required to make data shareable, based on a data management checklist, then costing each activity in terms of people’s time or physical resources needed such as hardware or software.

The tool was developed as part of the Data Management Planning for ESRC Research Data-rich Investments project (DMP-ESRC), in collaboration with various researchers.