Data collection, sustainability and integrity
- We've been requiring DMPs and talking about data for many years now, but data management is still often a mess - why?
- How do you ensure that a Data Management Plan is a living document and not a tick list item at the start of a project or PhD, which is then forgotten?
- "My funder won't pay for data storage so I never allocated funding in the grant." What will UKRI fund and how can it convince academics?
- How do you manage the long-term cost of storing data (after the end of the grant that funded the project)?
- How can you be sure that data can still be read in 10+ years' time? Issues of noise & data corruption?
- Who owns and governs research data management in your institution?
- What features would you like the UKRI’s data policy to have?
- How do you balance the environmental sustainability of long-term data storage vs repetition of collection?
- What are sensible pathways to building domain-specific data repos?
- Does anyone manage/oversee the UCL Data Stewards?
- Who on the panel has lost data? What happened as a result? How do we quantify the risks of failing to handle data effectively?
- How much input do RDMs have and should have in the full project life cycle from design to legacy?
- How do you manage long-term integrity for research software tools, like those written by a PhD student 15 years ago in PHP, that are still valuable?
- Are DMPs ever overkill?
- How much data is actually reused 10 years after it's been generated? At what point should it be deleted, or are we getting into keeping it "forever"?
Building relationships with industrial partners
- How do we ensure industrial partnerships benefit society? E.g. should we open DRI to fossil fuel companies?
- How does industry involvement affect the long-term legacy of digital research outputs including software and data?
- How do you ensure that partnerships don't perpetuate old boy networks
- How do you deal with the very different time constraints between Universities (bureaucracy, often elephantic schedules) and industry (quite agile)?
- What are your thoughts and recommendations to handle relationships when a company fails to deliver a project and affects people’s jobs?
Strategy development, business cases and securing funding
- How can we reconcile the different cultures and goals of the for-profit industry and non-profit academia in terms of spending and earnings from DRI?
- What is the best and worst business case you've seen?
- Government priorities change often due to politics, how can we reduce our exposure to this instability?
- For early career researchers, who have urgency around funding and development, how can DRI proactively reduce uncertainty and risk to proposals?
- As an IT staffer who isn’t involved in writing business cases, how do we encourage academics to engage with us to support their case?
- How to make progress when higher-level data and computing strategies are missing?
- How do you learn to make good business cases, in addition to trial and error?
- Does writing these funding applications take too much time from researchers?
- While we’re talking about national and international goals and strategy, where do potential DRI provisions like a national data repository fit into this?
- "Incremental" is a bad word. Discuss!
- What should funders do to bridge funding between siloed and time-restricted funding?
The funding landscape and making connections to align with UKRI calls
- My team isn’t made up of academics, but our deliverables are often DRI. Can/should we be applying for grants? How do we go about it if so?
- What's been the most surprising connection or funding route you've found?
- "Old boys' networks" were mentioned. How does this fit in with your "relationship building"? Not necessarily just about gender.
- Isn't the DRI professionals applying to grants not only an issue of funders' requirements but wider research culture barriers? how can these be addressed?