Coordinating Data Services in the Lab: Connecting The Research Lifecycle

Background: A major research challenge is the lack of standardized data workflows across our campus. While administrative and lab safety protocols exist, we identified a significant gap in procedures related to research data, particularly at the crucial points of entering and exiting a lab environment. Through a group partnership, we were able to artfully collect existing documents and resources across the entire data lifecycle, and connect directly with researchers to ensure we captured the essential RDM-related activities, steps, and resources one should consider during the on and offboarding process.

Description: Coordinated efforts between data professionals in the library, research labs, and information technology departments can reshape institutional data services. Indeed, such collaborative efforts offer a unique opportunity to implement superior data management workflows while also addressing domain-specific challenges. Our institutional vision for a more inclusive data management environment involves multiple research data stakeholders working together to support the advancement of health and science. Bringing together multiple stakeholders enabled us to provide solutions for data reproducibility including project synchronicity and advancement. This talk discusses our collective effort to develop and maintain data management templates to assist researchers during the employee onboarding and offboarding processes, and the progress made in marketing those resources to the community.

Conclusion: The partnership allowed us to preemptively generate additional templates for creating data management plans (DMPs), in order to prepare labs for new data management requirements stipulated by the National Institutes of Health, coming in 2023. By using the institutionally supported templates with organization-specific guidance, resources, and examples, researchers will be poised to successfully manage data across projects and grants.

Resources created by the LMA Research Data Management Working Group discussed throughout this presentation are available in Open Science Framework: osf.io/pw7ed.