By Jeff Green

Members of the university community are invited to provide input on a pan-university document currently under development.

A draft of the Institutional Research Data Management (RDM) Strategy has been developed by a working group of the President’s Advisory Team.

The document is available here.

The aim of the strategy is to encourage the responsible and ethical use of research data through providing direction and support to researchers.

Federal requirement

The creation of the draft document for Memorial is a requirement of the federal government.

In March 2021, Canada’s tri-agencies – the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC); the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) -- released a research data management policy.

Part of this policy requires institutions receiving tri-agency funds to have an institutional research data management strategy that 1) emphasizes the importance of research data management, 2) outlines expectations of researchers when managing research data, 3) outlines institutional support and resources in terms of data management, and 4) will encourage a culture of recognizing data as research output.

RDM is an important part of the research process. RDM happens at each stage of the research data lifecycle and should be incorporated into each stage as appropriate.

Good data management helps to ensure that data are accurate, reliable, comprehensible, and reproducible (when appropriate). This in turn leads to more efficiency in research processes, more confidence in research results and more reliable peer review. Good data management is also necessary to comply with many funding and publishing requirements.

Institutional focus

Memorial is committed to providing an environment of research excellence through supports, resources, and services to enable Memorial’s researchers to follow best practices to ensure conscientiousness for ethical, secure and responsible data management.

A policy will also be developed by the Office of the Vice-President (Research) to guide implementing the RDM Strategy.

Researchers, faculty, staff, students and postdoctoral research fellows are invited to review the draft strategy and provide comments to rdmstrategy@mun.ca.

Feedback will be accepted for the next several months.