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Research Data MANTRA is a course designed for PhD students and others who are planning a research project using digital data. The online learning units on the left cover a number of important topics. This course is an Open Educational Resource that may be freely used by anyone. It is available through an open license for rejigging, rebranding, repurposing

Known as "dropbox for scientists", it is a completely free way to transfer large files around the Web. It is a classic problem: you need to send files to someone, or they need to send them to you, and there's no way except email. But they are too large or your administrator won't let you transfer the files by email at all.

FigShare allows to share data, negative results and unpublished figures.

BuzzData lets you share data in a social network fashion. It is possible to publish and discuss your data with others

These resources present a suite of flexible training materials to help people who are responsible for training or teaching researchers and research support staff in how to look after research data. The training materials are relevant to lecturers, tutors, graduate teaching assistants and research support staff in universities, colleges and research organisations.

This year's APA conference, to be held at the BMA in London, addresses the theme "Putting the infrastructure in place for digital preservation" and brings together leaders in the field from Europe and around the world, including academic, large scientific research, industrial and commercial stakeholders.

STFC has updated its Scientific Data policy. STFC's Executive Board recently approved the introduction of an over-riding data policy to provide guidance to its staff and communities. The policy consists of a set of general principles that cover the wide variety of scientific communities and existing practices that fall within STFC's remit. The key principle of the policy is that all funded activities are required to have a data management plan, which must be in line with recommended good practice. These individual plans will then have the added check of being subject to approval by the relevant STFC boards and panels. Although this has not been a critical issue, a single standardised policy has clear advantages in a single organisation. The policy was drawn up by an internal technical working group set up in 2009 and is in line with current thinking as well as improving transparency for those working for and with STFC.

JISC's Managing Research Data programme has, with an investment of nearly £2M, funded a strand of eight Research Data Management Infrastructure (RDMI) projects to provide the UK Higher Education sector with examples of good research data management. The RDMI projects have identified requirements to manage data created by researchers within an institution, or across a group of institutions, and then piloted research data management infrastructures at institutional, departmental or research group level, to address these requirements. This report provides an analysis and synthesis of the benefits from this work identified by the eight RDMI projects in their benefits case studies, the benefits and enhancements that accrued to existing tools and methodologies from them, and the emerging business cases (as of June 2011) for sustainability being built by the RDMI projects.

This year's APA conference addresses the theme "Putting the infrastructure in place for digital preservation" and brings together leaders in the field from Europe and around the world, from academic, large scientific research, industrial and commercial stakeholders. Topics will include: * the challenges which major information holders and solution providers are addressing * the latest news on developing a coherent view of what works in digital preservation and how the research efforts and developments fit together * what infrastructure is being put in place to help you * how to check whether you or those you fund are doing an adequate job in preserving information - and how to improve * how to build the business case for preservation * how preservation fits into the commercial world, including privacy and security * success stories from which we can learn The keynote speaker will be EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, Vice-President for the Digital Agenda; we also have speakers from the Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation in India, the US National Archives (NARA) and Library of Congress. A senior representative of the British Government will speak on the second day. Looking at the role of the commercial sector in digital preservation and re-use, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM will be taking part in a discussion panel on the High Level Expert Group's report 'Riding the Wave'. The purpose of the conference is to inform our members and the wider international communities about progress in the area of digital preservation and related infrastructure from many sources, academic as well as industrial and commercial. We aim to get feedback about needs, expectations and experiences. Traditional memory institutions and at least some of the scientific community have been aware for some time about the importance of digital preservation and it is very clear that commerce, industry, the arts, banking and investment in

This collaborative project sought to promote research data management skills of postgraduate research students in the health studies discipline through a specially-developed training programme which focuses on qualitative, unstructured research data. The project was funded by JISC under their Managing Research Data (JISCMRD) Programme. The project ran from 1st October 2010 to 31st July 2011.

Free Cloud Computing and the Law toolkit for FE and HE professionals. Whether you work in a teaching, research, management or support capacity, the aim is to help you to make confident, informed decisions about implementing cloud computing solutions in your institution.

The DataTrain teaching materials have been designed to familiarise post-graduate students in good practice in looking after their research data. A central tenet is the importance of thinking about this in conjunction with the projected outputs and publication of research projects.

The Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) at Queen Mary, University of London has embarked on a three year project to undertake academic research in relation to cloud computing and to disseminate the key findings of that research.

Experts exchange their practical knowledge and experiences on digital preservation. Day 1 - 19.10.2011 "GETTING READY FOR DIGITAL PRESERVATION" The necessary "preparations" and fundamental decisions are the most underestimated challenges of digital preservation. But especially those tasks are bumps in the road which, if they aren't addressed early on, will remain constant challenges through the process of digital preservation. For those reasons the first block of the conference is dedicated to different aspects of necessary preparations and fundamental decisions. Experiences made in daily work of libraries and archives are presented and ways of dealing with challenges are communicated to the attendees. The following questions should be answered in this block: * How can a meaningful contextual and technical selection of holdings for digital preservation be made? * Which collections and digital objects should be dealt with first? * What expectations do users have in digital preservation? What do those expectations mean for the digital preservation process? * Should objects be normalized before ingest / when entering the collection? If so, how? What are recommended formats? * What gaps exist between existing digital preservation systems and institutional requirements? * What risks exist for different types of data and material? * What does the implementation of digital preservation mean for an institution? Which steps need to be considered? What are the challenges? * Which aspects of digital preservation are unanswered as of today / what are the main areas of further development, research and action? Day 2 - 20.10.2011 THE INGEST PROCESS FOR DIFFERENT TYPES OF DIGITAL MATERIAL Ingest describes the entire process of information transfer into the digital archive. The focus of this presentation block will be practitioner reports about experiences made in the development and implementation of ingest workflows for differe

DataFlow will be hardening a prototype developed in the JISC-funded ADMIRAL project. ADMIRAL allowed researchers to upload and share very large (terabyte-sized) datasets on the cloud.

The DC-2011 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications keynote speakers are Mikael Nilsson, Google and Emmanuelle Bermès, Centre Pompidou. The remainder of the conference program on 22-23 September consists of peer reviewed papers, project reports and posters. Pre-conference activities on 21 September include either: (1) a full day of tutorials with Stephanie Taylor (UKOLN), Antoine Issac (Web an Media Group, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Paul Hermans (Erfgoedplus.be ('heritage-plus')), and Emma Tonkin (UKOLN); or (2) a full day special session on Vocabulary Management and Alignment. DCMI Community working sessions are held throughout the conference.

The previous paper pointed major disruptive impacts of cloud as a business service. The changing technological base together with the disrupters will channel many innovative services and reconfiguration of the supply industry.

Part three focuses on the impacts cloud will have on buyers and service providers.

Part two focuses on the challenges cloud will present for buyers and providers of services.

With cloud computing becoming an increasingly important element of the IT function of most organizations, this five-part report presents a state-of-the-art review of the key features of cloud computing and its likely near-term and long-term development trends.