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Research data is an important outcome of research. Making it accessible to everyone in a way that can be reused helps the whole research community to reproduce research. Making research data available, alongside journal articles and research software, is crucial to maximising our impact, the value of our work, and public investment.

UKERC has long believed in the principles of proactive data management to benefit its researchers and the wider energy research community.  At The Energy Data Centre (EDC), the team created and monitored the planning process, giving specialist advice when requested. This blog post reviews the progress the EDC has made, what data is now available and from where.

Approach

The EDC team had three concepts in mind when introducing the management of the data:

• “As open as possible, as closed as necessary”: Not all data can be made openly available due to ethical or commercial reasons. The starting point should be that it should be available.
• “Make conscious decisions”: By making a Data Management Plan (DMP), the researcher is then making conscious decisions about their ability to share data.
• “Put your data where others will expect to find it”: The EDC is not the only data repository available. With a wide range of domains within UKERC, there may be another more appropriate repository.

Outcomes

The EDC team supported a total of 39 projects within UKERC Research Activities and our Flexfund projects.  As UKERC enters a new phase of funding, we are now tracking the outputs described in the DMPs and the availability of data. Figure one shows that that 36% of projects have made data available and 23% of the projects either didn’t create data or the data is not able to be made public. The remaining projects are being followed up as they complete their data management activities.

Figure 1 Status of the availability of data produced in UKERC4

Of the available data, the figure below shows who now holds the data.

Figure 2 Location of the data made available

The EDC and the UK Data Service (UKDS) are the major repositories.  Other places are university data repositories, the Zenodo repository service and supplementary data in an open access journal.  The EDC has created a record of all data generated by UKERC4 researchers, wherever it has been deposited.

Conclusions

The data management process undertaken in Phase 4 of UKERC has resulted in significantly more research data becoming available. This is a conscious decision by researchers. The EDC’s Collection page for Phase 4 brings together available data and grey literature as a record of the research undertaken in this phase. There are still professional and technical challenges to sharing some types of research data, in particular modelling and Jupyter notebooks, but the EDC team are working on these areas, alongside UKERC researchers and other professionals to enable good practice to be enacted.

We look forward to working with researchers on the data from UKERC 2024-2029 and continuing to support them to make their data available to increase their research impact.