These slides are from a half-day workshop run on Monday 20 February 2017 at the International Digital Curation Conference 2017 (IDCC17) on “Demonstrating the Value and Impact of Research Data Services”.
It provides the latest overview of research findings and tools for assessing the benefits, costs, and return on investment of research data curation.
The workshop organisers were Neil Beagrie and Daphne Charles (Charles Beagrie Ltd) and Mike Priddy (DANS) and the Consortium of European Social Science Archives (CESSDA).
At the workshop attendees learnt from Neil Beagrie and Mike Priddy about how to apply the Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit, the Capability Development Model, and the Archive Development Canvas (a variant of the Business Model Canvas) developed by the CESSDA Strengthening and Widening Project (CESSDA-SaW). Although the CESSDA-SaW project work focuses on the social sciences, core elements are multi-disciplinary and relevant to a wide range of organisations at IDCC involved in development, funding, and advocacy for research data infrastructures and open access for data.
CESSDA-SaW is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 programme. Its principal objective is to develop the maturity of data archive services that are aspiring to be, or are a part of the CESSDA community of social science data archives in a coherent and deliberate way towards the vision of a comprehensive, distributed and integrated social science data research infrastructure, facilitating access to social science data resources for researchers regardless of the location of either researcher or data. As part of the project, we have been developing the Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit, the Capability Development Model, and the Archive Development Canvas to assist data archive services.
The expected learning outcomes from the workshop were that all attendees would:
• Understand the purpose of CESSDA-SaW, the Toolkit, Capability Development Model, and the Archive Development Canvas;
• Understand what is specific to social science, to different funding regimes, or maturity of services;
• Know the main findings from the desk research on the Toolkit and key lessons learnt;
• Understand economic approaches such as Return on Investment, other key arguments for Value, how it has been calculated, and why the counter-factual and “cost of inaction” are important;
• Understand how to use the Capability Development Model to undertake a self-assessment;
• Know what outputs will be available from CESSDA-SaW and how they might use them.