Improving Research Data Management at Bishop’s, thanks to the RESEARCH SUPPORT FUND

The Research Support Fund (RSF) of the Government of Canada is a program that provides funds to cover a portion of the costs associated with managing the research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Research Support Fund grants are based on the funding received by researchers from the three federal agencies in the three most recent years for which data are available. The RSF contributes to the salaries and benefits of employees who support the federally funded research enterprise, including the staff working in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies (ORGS), the Library Learning Commons (LLC) and the Information and Technology Services (ITS). It also contributes to the tools and informational resources necessary to carry out Bishop’s research programs, for example library resources, software and other digital tools, computing and network infrastructure, and research data sets.

Thanks to the RSF, the ORGS can work collaboratively with the LLC and ITS to develop Bishop’s new policy on Research Data Management (RDM), in compliance with the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy. RDM involves the active organization and maintenance of data throughout the research process, and suitable archiving of the data at the project’s completion. It is an on-going activity throughout the data lifecycle.

The three federal granting agencies that promote and support research in Canada believe that research data collected through the use of public funds should be responsibly and securely managed and be, where ethical, legal and commercial obligations allow, available for reuse by others. To this end, each postsecondary institution and research hospital eligible to administer funds from those agencies is required to create an institutional RDM strategy by March 1, 2023. The LLC recently hired a new resource, Mathieu Cloutier, to support the development of this RDM strategy and help researchers with their data management plans. This working group will set the stage for a digital data deposit where grant recipients will be able to share relevant research data and code. In the implementation of this policy, the RSF will also support improved information resources and professional development training in the coming months.