Research Data Support at the Royal Veterinary College: A Case Study

In Autumn, 2018, I began working to set up a research data repository at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London, working primarily with Dr. Dan O'Neill, an epidemiologist. The resulting efforts offer some instructive insight into the challenges and opportunities presented for librarians and research support staff by open repositories, and specifically the expectation, increasingly held by researchers, that technical and administrative support in the matter of open data be available to them via their institution's library and/or IT services. The poster documents, visually and descriptively, the different parties and systems involved in the effort to support what remains a relatively nascent expectation among researchers. This expectation, in turn, has been generated by external (expectations of peer reviewers, grant funder policy), institutional (research data policies specific to their institution), and professional (effective techniques for collaboration, intellectual property concerns related to use of commercial repositories) responsibilities. This poster looks at the different concepts and stakeholders represented in a local project in an attempt to draw out some widely applicable truths and recommendations.