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During the past two-decades academic libraries updated current staff job responsibilities or created brand new roles. This allowed them to adapt to scholarly communication developments and consequently enabled them to offer efficient services to their users. The global calls for openly accessible research results has shifted the institutional, national and international focus and their constant evolvement has required the creation of new research positions in academic libraries. This study reports on the findings of an analysis of job descriptions in the open research services as advertised by UK academic libraries. Method: From March 2015 to March 2017, job advertisements relating to open access, repositories and research data management were collected. Results: The analysis of the data showed that the primary responsibilities of the open research support staff were: to ensure and facilitate compliance with funders' open access policies, maintain the tools that enable compliance, create reports and collect statistics that measure compliance rates and commit to continuous liaising activities with research stakeholders. Discussion: It is clear that the open research services is a complex environment, requiring a variety of general and subject specific skill sets, while often a role may involve more than one area of expertise. Conclusion: The results of this study could benefit prospective employees and universities that wish to embed open research skills in their curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The funder Jisc supported 27 british universities to establish or improve their research data manangement (RDM) services in 2011-2013. The comprehensive materials and tools by the Digital Curation Center (DDC), which handle the entire life cycle of the data, offered orientation. The structure of this article also follows this cycle to describe the state-of-the-art RDM as it was realized by six Jisc projects that will be focussed on. The aim of this analysis was to elicit from these examples which tasks are undertaken by libraries. Primarily, this are the overall management of RDM Services and the implementation of training. Repositories and metadata are also mostly curated here, while these tasks are often located at the IT services, as well as the project management and requirements analysis. The policy development is one more important task of the library, frequently held in cooperation with the research services, which are almost always in charge of data management planning (DMP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with informed consent, anonymization is an accepted method of protecting the interests of research participants, while allowing data collected for official statistical purposes to be reused by other agencies within and outside government. The Decennial Census, carried out in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, is a major event in the production of research data and provides an important resource for a variety of organizations. This article combines ethical evaluation, a review of relevant law and guidance, and analysis of 30 qualitative interviews (carried out during the period of the 2001 UK Census), in order to explore the adequacy of the current framework for the protection of informational privacy in relation to census data. Taking account of Nissenbaum's concept of “contextual integrity,” Vedder's concept of “categorical privacy,” and Sen's call to heed of the importance of “actual behavior,” it will be argued that the current “contractarian” view of the relationship between an individual participant and the organization carrying out the Census does not engage sufficiently with actual uses of data. As a result, people have expectations of privacy that are not matched by practice and that the current normative—including the governance—framework cannot capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a case study of work performed at King's College London to survey information management practices, policies, and procedures applied by data creators and managers within three research units and three business units, and to determine the risk factors that may limit access and use of their digital assets over time. The assessment framework adopted to assess practices brings together components of the Data Asset Framework to analyze ad hoc data handling processes performed within departments, and combines it with the system-level Digital Repository Audit Methodology Based on Risk Assessment evaluation framework to identify the potential risks that may occur and the consequences to the institution or individual unless action is taken. It was found that data management activities within the academic units are comparable to a curate's egg, containing many actions performed in conformance to best practice, but also including poorly considered approaches that have the potential to restrict access and use of digital information over time. To address the identified risk factors, a holistic, multi-tiered approach should be adopted through the development of an institution-level management infrastructure and policy framework, supported by ongoing training and advice for staff directly working with data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this data note we provide the details of a research database of 4831 adult intensive care patients who were treated in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, UK between 2015 and 2019. The purposes of this publication are to describe the dataset for external researchers who may be interested in making use of it, and to detail the methods used to curate the dataset in order to help other intensive care units make secondary use of their routinely collected data. The curation involves linkage between two critical care datasets within our hospital and the accompanying code is available online. For reasons of data privacy the data cannot be shared without researchers obtaining appropriate ethical consents. In the future we hope to obtain a data sharing agreement in order to publicly share the de-identified data, and to link our data with other intensive care units who use a Philips clinical information system., Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.