8 - Staffing a Research Data Service

Summary

Aims

The aim of this chapter is to help you think through the staffing issues around supporting research data management and for a research data service.

New activities and roles

A greater focus on RDM implies some new activities, such as preparing data to be shared or providing training. Or it could imply a redistribution of activities, e.g. from the researcher to someone in an RDS. It may create wholly new roles, especially in the support area or in running a repository. Logically, this creation or redistribution of work can be met in a number of ways:

1 Research teams themselves may take on new tasks, be that the principal investigator or research assistants, e.g. taking on primary responsibility for data management in a project or documenting data at the end of the project.

2 Existing local support staff might take on a role; for example, if an academic department has an IT specialist or someone who helps write project proposals, they might take on some roles associated with RDM. They might offer day-to-day support around storing active data or help write a data management plan.

3 Existing central support staff could add a new role – be they in the library, IT, records management, research administration, staff development, or in a number of other departments. Such new roles could involve anything from adding some slides about RDM to a briefing on information literacy through to running a data repository. This could be on the basis of their existing knowledge and skills or by them having some retraining and upskilling. It might be that a few people have their job significantly changed, or that tasks are widely distributed across a large number of staff in different teams.

4 The organisation could employ new staff to take on the role; perhaps even in a new organisational structure. For example, a new coordinator might be appointed to ensure that all the professional services supporting RDM are moving in the same direction.

Logically there are three other possibilities:

1 Some new activities created in the context of RDM are met collaboratively across a number of institutions. For example, it could be that a local cross-institutional network could take on training of researchers in RDM.