Funder RDM compliance checking

Some institutional strategies were shared in June 2017:

Original message:
At the University of York we have started to investigate how we might implement a process for checking/reporting on compliance with funder RDM requirements. To inform our decisions, we would like to know if other UK
institutions:

undertake any kind of funder RDM compliance checking
and if you do: (a) how you do it; (2) which funders do you check; and
(3) if you can, give a ballpark figure for the amount of resource that is
required to undertake the checks.

Many thanks, Lindsey

Lindsey Myers
Research Support Librarian
Information Services I University of York

From: Zosia Beckles [email protected]
Subject: Re: Funder RDM compliance checking

Hi Lindsey

We do some limited compliance monitoring at Bristol - we check EPSRC/NERC funded articles for compliant data access statements. When the Open Access team receives a request for an APC payment for an article acknowledging EPSRC/NERC funding, they forward the article details on to us and we check that it has a compliant data access statement, and send the author a reminder if it doesn't. We probably spend 1-2 hours a week on this, depending on the number sent through from Open Access. We're just capturing a small subset of all the articles that should have statements, but it does seem to be helping the message filter through.

For info, we should have a paper discussing this in a bit more detail in SCONUL Focus 69, when that comes out. Let me know if you have any questions in the meantime though!

Regards

Zosia

Zosia Beckles
Research Data Librarian
Research Data Service
Library Services
University of Bristol

From: Mary Donaldson [email protected]
Subject: Re: Funder RDM compliance checking

Hi Lindsey,

We've incorporated some wording in the standard emails that we use for open access, asking researchers about the dataset underpinning the publication. This has increased awareness and does not require any significant resourcing - once the standard emails are drafted, they are used for open access anyway. It is hard to quantify how many extra enquires this generated for our RDM team as we're starting to get very good engagement with some groups of researchers regardless of the OA emails.

We have also done a benchmarking exercise for EPSRC-funded papers for each of the first two years of the mandatory EPSRC data policy. This has involved checking every paper which cites EPSRC funding and which was published during the specified period and assigning it to one of the following categories:

Data citation present.
No data citation but supporting information available.
No data citation - experimental paper
No data citation - theoretical paper
Other.

This has allowed us to monitor how we're doing in getting the message out to EPSRC-funded researchers, and since the results can be filtered by discipline, we can use this analysis to better target training over the next year.

In terms of resource, each time the analysis has been done has required about 15 hours of research and another couple of hours for synthesis.

Best wishes,
Mary