Advancing research data publishing practices for the social sciences: from archive activity to empowering researchers

Sharing and publishing social science research data have a long history in the UK, through long-standing agreements with government agencies for sharing survey data and the data policy, infrastructure, and data services supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. The UK Data Service and its predecessors developed data management, documentation, and publishing procedures and protocols that stand today as robust templates for data publishing. As the ESRC research data policy requires grant holders to submit their research data to the UK Data Service after a grant ends, setting standards and promoting them has been essential in raising the quality of the resulting research data being published. In the past, received data were all processed, documented, and published for reuse in-house. Recent investments have focused on guiding and training researchers in good data management practices and skills for creating shareable data, as well as a self-publishing repository system, ReShare. ReShare also receives data sets described in published data papers and achieves scientific quality assurance through peer review of submitted data sets before publication. Social science data are reused for research, to inform policy, in teaching and for methods learning. Over a 10 years period, responsive developments in system workflows, access control options, persistent identifiers, templates, and checks, together with targeted guidance for researchers, have helped raise the standard of self-publishing social science data. Lessons learned and developments in shifting publishing social science data from an archivist responsibility to a researcher process are showcased, as inspiration for institutions setting up a data repository

Creating Shareable Research Data Training in Kyrgyzstan

In March 2018, during the local Spring break, Veerle Van Den Eynden and Louise Corti from the UK Data Service visited Kyrgyzstan to provide training on research data sharing. The main focus of their visit was to support creating a large collection of sensitive interviews, case studies and focus group discussions from the national Gender in Society Perceptions Study (GSPS). This followed an enquiry by United Nations (UN) Women Country Office in the Kyrgyz Republic a year ago. Veerle and Louise offered advice on anonymization and sharing of the data and the possibility of using the UK Data Service as a place of deposit due to there being no full-fledged Kyrgyzstani data repository. This was followed up with a training workshop to advance the data management and sharing capacity in the country, organised by the Principal Investigator of the study, Meghan McCormack, who is also a law lecturer at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA). The training event was supported by AMICAL (American International Consortium of Academic Libraries) with the UK Data Archive offering pro-bono training time for Veerle and Louise

Plant Uses by the Topnaar of the Sesfontein Area (Namib Desert)

The Kuiseb Topnaar use some 50 different plants for food, woodfuel, cosmetics, as drugs, for construction, .... The different plants are presented here and their uses discussed and compared to uses in other settings