Data Management Administration Online (DMAOnline)

Khokhar, Masud and Schwamm, Hardy and Krug, John and Albin-clark, Adrian (2017) Data Management Administration Online (DMAOnline). Procedia Computer Science, 106. pp. 291-298. ISSN 1877-0509

Abstract

In the uncertain Higher Education environment today, where value for money and financial rigour is more important than ever before, it is vital that institutions create and sustain services that exhibit evidence of impact and provide value for money. In the last two years, external pressures from UK funding councils on complying with their Research Data Management (RDM) policies has caused institutions to develop services and support models urgently. These services are usually created for a fixed period, often with a short term investment in staff and/or infrastructure, and primarily because of the lack of clarity in the resultant value for money at an early stage. Monitoring compliance with funding council requirements is complex. Many institutions use Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) to handle their publication and research data catalogues. However, these systems provide only a basic level of functionality for RDM (e.g. submission of datasets information and linking it with project and publications information). Compliance reporting is not provided out of the box and essential information is usually kept in additional systems or spreadsheets by institutions (e.g. whether a data access statement exists or not). This makes the whole process of RDM compliance monitoring cumbersome and time consuming. We introduce Data Management Administration Online (DMAOnline)1, a Jisc Research Data Spring2 project, which facilitates a novel metric based analysis of an institution's compliance with RDM mandates. DMAOnline brings together key RDM information from a variety of sources and provides a normalised structure for the underlying data. This enables ingest of data from a variety of sources e.g. CRIS, Institutional Repositories or Excel sheets. Currently, DMAOnline has the capability to harvest its information from Elsevier's Pure CRIS and Excel files. It also allows users to add in additional information not available from these sources. A powerful dashboard is created for the user that provides information on compliance with RDM policies, data storage usage, data management plans, DOIs minted, datasets preserved, and basic costing. Other systems that DMAOnline already does or intends to harvest information from include DMPOnline3, Archivematica4, DataCite5, and IRUS-data UK6.