Towards a generic research data management infrastructure

Until recent years, a focused and centralized strategy for the annotation, storage and curation of research\ud data is something that has not been widely considered within academic communities. The majority of\ud research data sits, fragmented, on a variety of disk structures (Desktops, network & external hard drives)\ud and is usually managed locally, with little interest paid to policies governing how it is backed up,\ud disseminated and organized for short or long term reuse.\ud Recognition of how current practices and infrastructure present a barrier to research, has resulted in several\ud recent academic programmes which have focused on developing comprehensive frameworks for the\ud management and curation of research data1-3. Many of these frameworks (such as the Archer suite of e-\ud Research tools1), however, are large and complex, and have an overreliance on new and novel technologies\ud making them unwieldy and difficult to support.\ud The paper discusses the development of a simpler framework for the management of research data through\ud its full lifecycle, allowing users to annotate and structure their research in a secure and backed up\ud environment. The infrastructure is being developed as a pilot system and is expected to work with data\ud from approximately a dozen researchers and manage several Terabytes of data. The technical work is a\ud strand of the MaDAM (Manchester Data Management) project at The University of Manchester which is\ud funded by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme.1