University of Nottingham leads way to secure vital research data - Arkivum

Archiving & Preservation / 13 Nov, 2018

How effective is your digital research strategy?

The University of Nottingham leads the way to secure its vital research including life sciences data.

A key area of focus across universities today is to implement a comprehensive Digital Research Strategy that safeguards and preserves their vital research data. Why is this so important? Many Universities have huge and ever growing amounts of scientific data such as pharmacology, neurosciences or genetics and as with all scientific research data, the issue is that you don’t know when you are going to need to access the data as it is often prompted by further scientific study.

Important elements for your research strategy include:

  • Grows with your organisation as the volume of data increases
  • Ensures 100% data integrity – you need to know you can trust the data when you are ready to use it, whether in 1 years’ time or 50 years’ time.
  • Provides easy accessibility and discoverability of your data when you need it.
  • Complies with Research Council and funder data retentions and access requirements.

The University of Nottingham

After initially becoming an Arkivum client last year to manage 10 TB of their long-term data, the University of Nottingham worked with us to expand the coverage further as an important part of their University-wide Digital Research Strategy, providing the ability to manage over 1 PB of data.

The Research Strategy that the University of Nottingham is implementing focuses on being recognised for their world-class research based on both research excellence and quality, and their drive to develop research professionals and support the next generation of research leaders.

The key drivers behind this initiative are:

  • Widen access to the data while maintaining compliance:
    Wider access to the data while maintaining compliance with the Research Councils’ access and re-use regulations which state that research data must be made available for 10 years since the data of last access. This means that data must be managed for the long-term, potentially decades and decades.
  • To increase awareness of Nottingham’s stellar research credentials:
    The University of Nottingham has outstanding research credentials and are looking to increase awareness of these globally. By doing so, it will continue to attract high calibre candidates to study at the University and generate increased collaboration with similar organisations.
  • Smarter data management to reduce costs:
    Data storage can be expensive, especially when volumes of data are ever increasing. This initiative has helped the University of Nottingham reduce costs significantly from using active and expensive “hot” storage to maintain inactive and rarely accessed data. This reduction in storage costs has led to investment elsewhere in the University.
  • A central platform for researchers:
    Currently there are limited solutions available for researchers to access the data. By providing a central platform, it means security and compliance can be met at all times and data management policies can be managed centrally to the organisation. More importantly though, it has increased the ability for collaboration across the University.

In summary, the University of Nottingham has adopted smarter long-term data management to support the delivery of their Digital Research Strategy across the University, benefitting from a reduction in data management costs and the ability to safeguard their data, making sure their vital research is accessible and usable for years to come.

For more information about protecting your research data through data archiving & safeguarded storage and how Arkivum can help, view the recording of our webinar chaired by Dr Matthew Addis:

View the recording

Emma Davenport

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