LERU produces research data roadmap

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) has produced the LERU Roadmap for Research Data, providing a guide for research-intensive universities. The guide can be used for any European university that wants to engage with the potential and challenges of data-driven research.

Building on the Royal Society Report Science as an Open Enterprise, the Roadmap looks at the implications of data-driven research for European universities. In a series of chapters, the Roadmap charts a course through a number of issues. These include advocacy for the benefits/challenges of sharing and re-using research data, technical infrastructures and standards needed to support this move, the likely costs of such developments, the skills and knowledge needed to manage such a move, and the training and development opportunities that will need to be created to secure a successful journey through this landscape.

The Roadmap builds on LERU’s earlier Roadmap to research publications. The new LERU Roadmap for Research Data explores in particular the benefits of making data open. There are distinct advantages in making data available for sharing and re-use – the ability to re-validate research findings, avoidance of duplicated effort, a potential reduction in research costs, and quicker routes to finding solutions to some of the grand research challenges facing society in areas such as public health and global warming.

The Roadmap ends with a series of recommendations aimed at named constituencies, the purpose of which is to suggest ways in which researchers, LERU universities, and support services such as Libraries, IT Services and Research Administration can make a contribution. The Roadmap also suggests how the European Commission itself can contribute to the debate through its Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020.