This month, the UK’s Digital Curation Centre will host the 2018 International Digital Curation Conference in Barcelona. The conference theme is "Beyond FAIR - from principles to practice to global join up" and the focus will be on sharing practical lessons on data curation and sharing. The Springer Nature Research Data Team will be at IDCC to present on two aspects of our work - our Research Data Helpdesk, and the impact of our data policies and data availability statements at Nature journals.

Our Research Data Helpdesk has been available to researchers, authors and editors since June 2016, and in that time we have received queries on a range of data-related topics. Our IDCC poster presentation delves into some of the stats we’ve gathered around data queries - who is looking for our help? Which topics come up most often? And once we answer queries - are people satisfied with the information we provide? You can see our poster at the end of this blog and it will be displayed at the IDCC poster exhibition, as well as being presented at “Minute Madness” on Tuesday 22nd.

Our paper “The impact on authors and editors of introducing Data Availability Statements at Nature journals” also represents an investigation on the impact of the work of the Research Data team, in this case relating to the roll-out of standard journal-level research data policies. In 2016 Nature-titled journals adopted policies which include a requirement for authors to add a data availability statement to their manuscripts. We have gathered data from internal editors to assess the impact of the new policies on the time added to editorial workflows, as well as evaluating the different ways that authors choose to share their data (e.g. in supplementary material, or repositories). The results of our analysis will be presented during the 11.30 session on February 21st, and we’ll also be making our slides, pre-print paper, and underlying dataset available.

If you’re interested in hearing more about these topics or what else the Research Data Team has been working on, please come and say hello at IDCC Barcelona!

Poster: