Research data management (RDM) in Jordanian public university libraries: Present status, challenges and future perspectives

The present investigation was undertaken to find the existing position including the policies, practices and the issues and concerns of librarians in collecting, processing and archiving the research data in public university libraries in Jordan. Research is the bastion of scientific growth and development of a society and the data is its chief ingredient which communicates the results and inferences of the research. The research process is directly interrelated with the data life cycle and the two cannot be segregated. Keeping the importance of the curation and management of the research data and the trivial policy interests of the funding agencies and the governments, the current study was undertaken to explore the Research Data Management (RDM) status and practices in Jordan. The study used the online questionnaire to get the opinions and the prevailing state of affairs from the librarians/heads of the libraries in the public universities. The study is an eye opener for the higher education commission in Jordan to design the policies and suitable guidelines for streamlining the RDM system in the country especially the Public and Private Universities. It can be pursued for the exploration of RDM practices and policies in similar other Middle East countries for determining the issues and challenges in implementing the RDM policies in their research institutes. It revealed that the Jordan lags RDM polices at all fronts of government, institutional as well as that of the funding agencies which hinders all the progress and growth of RDM in university libraries. However, keeping all the obstacles and the challenges aside, the Jordanian Public University Libraries (JPUL) are providing RDM services, although on a limited scale, at different levels of curating only some valuable research data, preserving and providing access to the preferred users through online platforms substituting the data repositories. There is a lack of national and international RDM policies and ineffective implementation. Coupled with this, is the wider gap between the required skills and the available skills among the library staff which can be filled by conducting suitable training programs and workshops on continuous basis to impart the skills required to manage RDM practices in libraries. Further improvements in providing the effective RDM services is the need among the JPUL and similar may be the case in other middle east countries including the development of infrastructure, policy framing, designing of data repository, specialized courses on data archiving, data cataloguing, data sharing, etc. while protecting the intellectual property rights. The similar studies can be explored to find the existing policies and the loopholes in implementation of national and international policies of data management in different research institutes. The more important area would be to pursue the role of funding agencies and the framing of suitable policies regarding the data curation and management of their funded projects. The distinction of the present research study can be considered by the fact that there is a lack of sufficient studies in Jordanian universities which can present a comprehensive proclamation on the processes and policies adopted by the libraries for research data collection, archiving and its accessibility. The study can help initiating the new policies regarding the data management tools and techniques in Jordan as we witness in some of the well developed countries of the world and even there are many courses running on research data management and its implementation in universities. The results of the present study can be used by other libraries especially in designing and developing the strategies of research data management which can help improving the data re-use and sharing in Jordan universities for secondary analysis. It can also help in refocusing the data and its immense value among research community. Besides, it can also help the research funding agencies and the government of the country to make policy decisions regarding the submission of reports along with the data so as to save lot of human efforts and resources for collecting and collating the necessary data for conducting researchers in future. The study will be helpful in reducing the financial burden of research projects of different funding agencies which otherwise are spending hugely on data collection, surveys, questionnaire designing, pilot studies, interviews, etc.