New report from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill on "Research Data Stewardship at UNC - Recommendations for Scholarly Practice and Leadership".
http://sils.unc.edu/sites/default/files/general/research/UNC_Research_Data_Stewardship_Report.pdfThis 74 page report identified three principles around which policy and implementation recommendations are organized.
Principle 1. UNC considers the data that are material for and resulting from academic research as a public good; preserving these data and making them available to the public within regulatory and legal constraints is part of UNC’s function as a public entity.
Principle 2. Researchers/data creators are responsible for specifying data life cycle plans that comply with constraints defined by pertinent law, funding agencies, and research community practices.
Principle 3. UNC is institutionally obligated to support creation, maintenance, and execution of data life cycle plans by affiliated researchers.
From the introduction:
"Scholarship in the 21st century depends on a variety of electronic tools that aid all phases of knowledge generation, sharing, and use. Scholars use electronic devices, sensors, harvesters, and surveys to collect data; databases and spreadsheets to store and manage it; statistical software to perform analyses; text editors to write about results; and networks to transfer all these elements of research to colleagues, publishers, and the public. Each of these tools creates and uses digital traces of processing, which are themselves part of the scholarly record (e.g., metadata, process control files, audit trails, backups). The general purpose term ‘research data’ now encompasses the traces of collection, processing, transmission, and use of scholarly work. The impact of digital research data has been recognized on many fronts, two of which have garnered substantial attention in scholarly communities. First, it is argued that data are a primary asset of new research, that aggregation, mining, and reuse of data provide a new resource for scholarly investigation and leads to what is termed e-Science (e.g., The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery) or more broadly, e-research. Second, it is clear that there are challenges to managing and preserving electronic data that are essential for all fields to advance (e.g., National Academy Press: Ensuring the integrity, accessibility, and stewardship of research data in the digital age). Because digital research data have become so important, funding agencies have begun requiring data management plans that encourage data sharing, some publishers are requiring deposit of data before accepting papers based upon them, and universities and research laboratories are developing policies, registries, and repositories for research data and products."
