Your Future Self Will Thank You: Encouraging Good Data Management Practice at Project Closure

CSIRO s Information Management and Technology (IM&T) provides cutting edge data storage and compute services for CSIRO s Science Units. Like many research organisations, we ve been grappling with exponential growth of research data holdings and a tendency for projects to leave data in working storage spaces after projects end closure resulting in orphaned data, cost inefficiencies, and gaps in metadata essential for managing data assets into the future. A concerted change management effort was required to shift the perception of data clean-up activities from a low priority administrative task to an enabler for science impact. The Research Data Management Capability Uplift Project, part of the Managed Data Ecosystem Programme, brought together stakeholders from Research Data Services, Technology Solutions for Research and the Research Units to investigate barriers faced by researchers preventing completion of four key activities: Publication, Archiving, Deletion, and Transfer. Workshops with researchers identified resource and time constraints at the delivery end of projects, difficulty navigating requirements and retention schedules, and unclear workflows across different systems as pain points. By employing human centred design principles to map researcher journeys through our platforms and embedding just-in-time guidance into the Resource Management System s automated project closure processes, researchers are now guided through the decision-making process required to clean up and manage end-of-project data. This paper will share lessons learned and successes on our path to instilling the idea among our researchers that good data lifecycle management is fundamental to maintaining community trust in CSIRO science and driving research impact.