Sourcing and Scaling University RDM Services. The Realities of Research Data Management, Part Four. OCLC Research Report

"The Realities of Research Data Management" is a four-part series that explores how research universities are addressing the challenge of managing research data throughout the research lifecycle. The series examines the context, influences, and choices higher education institutions face in building or acquiring research data management (RDM) capacity--in other words, the infrastructure, services, and other resources needed to support emerging data management practices. Findings are based on case studies of four institutions: University of Edinburgh (UK), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), Monash University (Australia), and Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands). This final report of the series examines the "sourcing and scaling" choices made by the four research universities regarding their acquisition of RDM capacity. The choices that individual institutions make with respect to sourcing and scaling likely depend on a host of factors, including local staffing and infrastructure, availability of cooperatively sourced or nationally provisioned services, and willingness to pay for commercially sourced solutions. The report concludes with some general insights about sourcing and scaling RDM services that emerge from the case studies. While each of the four case studies partners pursued a different strategy, there are trends that span the institutions, including: curation services are the most likely to be externalized education and expertise services are largely local in scale. Sourcing and scaling RDM changes to fit institutional needs. [For Part One, see ED589133. For Part Two, see ED589134. For Part Three, see ED589137. For the Supplemental, see ED589139.]