‘Don’t ruin it with mandatory questions. Mandatory questions aren’t cool.’: Building a popular research data manager
Andrew Kneynsberg1 1The University Of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia
Abstract
One challenging barrier to the introduction of a new system is user adoption. Researchers are resistant to change in areas where there is already a ‘workable’ solution in place. However, external hard drives and local share drives do not meet the standards of a good data management plan, let alone best practice in research data management. The goal at UQ was to gain majority user adoption of UQ Research Data Manager (UQRDM) to securely store and manage the university’s valuable research data.
The approach used by the UQRDM team to go from launch to 20,000 unique active users in 5 years was simple – provide data storage designed to meet the needs and requirements of researchers. UQRDM data storage is centralized and accessible by mapped drive and cloud interface providing 1 TB of free storage. Storage allocations are project based and can be shared with all collaborators and industry partners. The only requirement for access to UQRDM is a project title and the names of the researchers accessing the data.
Simple design for researchers doesn’t mean easy for the UQRDM, Data Library, or ITS teams. A joint effort was undertaken, to promote UQRDM among researchers and administration, gain user adoption, support the system, and deliver continuous improvement. This presentation will describe how these teams successfully accomplished this task, making UQRDM one the largest and most used research data manager in Australia, having provisioned 13,000 researchers and 10,000 students 120 PB of data for more than 18,000 project records.
Biography
Andrew Kneynsberg is a trained researcher, receiving his PhD in neuroscience for Michigan State University and moving to Australia in 2019 to complete a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Queensland Brain Institute. He transitioned out of academic research and joined the Research Management Systems team at the University of Queensland in 2021. Andrew now looks after UQ Research Data Manager (UQRDM), providing support, improvements, and new functionality.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7321-9415