Managing and Sharing Research Data: A Guide to Good Practice

• how to plan your research using a data management checklist
• how to format and organize data
• how to store and transfer data
• research ethics and privacy in data sharing and intellectual property rights
• data strategies for collaborative research
• how to publish and cite data
• how to make use of other people’s research data, illustrated with six real-life case studies of data use.  

Louise Corti is an Associate Director at the UK Data Archive and is Service Director of Collections Development and Data Publishing, overseeing the acquisition and ingest of high quality data of interest to social scientists. Her research activities are focused around standards and technologies for reviewing, curating and presenting digital social science data, particularly using open source infrastructures and tools.

She has led research awards and regularly publishes, edits and advises internationally on a wide range of issues relating to the archiving, sharing and reuse of data. In the 90s, Louise helped establish Qualidata, the world first national qualitative data archive, pioneering approaches for and solutions to qualitative data archiving. She has taught sociology, social research methods and statistics, and spent six years working on the design, implementation and analysis of the British Household Panel Study at Essex.

Veerle Van den Eynden manages the Research Data Management team for the UK Data Service. This team provides expertise, guidance and training on data management and data sharing to researchers, to promote good data practices and optimise data sharing. She combines this with a position as Research Data Manager for the Global Challenges project Drugs and (Dis)order at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Veerle has many years of experience researching interactions between people, plants and the environment, using a combination of social and natural science methods, and has experienced first-hand the benefits that data sharing brings to research.

Libby Bishop is the Coordinator for International Data Infrastructures in the Data Archive at GESIS-Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences. She manages connections between GESIS and international data infrastructures, such as the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). She is leading a task in the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Science Cloud (SSHOC) project on remote access to sensitive data. She publishes on the methodological and ethical issues of sharing and reusing data.

Matthew Woollard is Director of the UK Data Archive and the UK Data Service. He has practical and theoretical experience in all aspects of data service infrastructure, providing leadership in data curation, archiving and preservation activities. From 2002–2006 he was the Head of the History Data Service and from 2006–2010 an Associate Director and Head of Digital Preservation and Systems at the UK Data Archive. He currently provides leadership and strategic direction of the both the UK Data Archive and the ESRC-funded UK Data Service.