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The paper presents a literature review on research data management services in African academic and research libraries on the backdrop of the advancing open science and open research data infrastructures. It provides areas of focus for library to support open research data.

The literature analysis and future role of African libraries in research data management services were based on three areas as follows:open science, research infrastructures and open data infrastructures. Focussed literature searches were conducted across several electronic databases and discovery platforms, and a qualitative content analysis approach was used to explore the themes based on a coded list.

The review reports of an environment where open science in Africa is still at developmental stages. Research infrastructures face funding and technical challenges. Data management services are in formative stages with progress reported in a few countries where open science and research data management policies have emerged, cyber and data infrastructures are being developed and limited data librarianship courses are being taught.

The role of the academic and research libraries in Africa remains important in higher education and the national systems of research and innovation. Libraries should continue to align with institutional and national trends in response to the provision of data management services and as partners in the development of research infrastructures.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and implementation of policies, digital infrastructures and hands-on support for eResearch at the University of Göttingen. Core elements of this activity are to provide support for research data management to researchers of all disciplines and to coordinate on-campus activities. These activities are actively aligned with disciplinary, national and international policies and e-infrastructures.

The process of setting up and implementing an institutional data policy and its necessary communications and workflows are described and analysed. A first assessment of service development and uptake is provided in the area of embedded research data support.

A coordination unit for eResearch brings together knowledge about methods and tools that are otherwise scattered across disciplinary units. This provides a framework for policy implementation and improves the quality of institutional research environments.

The study provides information about an institutional implementation strategy for infrastructure and services related to research data. The lessons learned allow insights into current challenges and work ahead.

With a cross-cutting, “horizontal” approach, in the Göttingen eResearch Alliance, two research-orientated infrastructure providers, a library and an IT service, combine their services and expertise to develop an eResearch service and support portfolio for the Göttingen Campus.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the steps taken to produce new kinds of integrated documentation on the Holocaust in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project. The authors present the user investigation methodology as well as the novel data design to support this complex field.

The paper is based on the scholarly primitives framework. From here, it proceeds with two empirical studies of Holocaust archival research and the implementation steps taken. The paper employs key insights from large technology studies in how to organise such work. In particular, it uses the concepts of social-technical assemblages and intermediation.

The paper offers a number of findings. First from the empirical studies, it presents how Holocaust researchers and archivist perceive the way they currently do research in archives. It then presents how the intermediation and digital transformation of such research can be enabled without violating its foundations. The second major insight is the technical research into how to use graph databases to integrate heterogeneous research collections and the analysis opportunities behind.

The paper is based on existing work by the authors but takes this work forward into the world of real-life existing historical research on archives. It demonstrates how the theoretical foundations of primitives are fit for purpose. The paper presents a completely new approach on how to (re)organise archives as research infrastructures and offers a flexible way of implementing this. Next to these major insights, a range of new solutions are presented how to arrange the socio-technical assemblages of research infrastructures.

This paper aims to outline principal implications for institutions, particularly universities, in supporting the increasingly complex tools which are used in the data lifecycle.

The discussion paper draws upon the experience of authors in this domain at the institutional, national and international levels.

Support for research tools by universities has high-level implications, ranging from financial, strategic and compliance through to capacity, capability and connectivity. The large number of existing tools highlights the need to evaluate them against standardised checklists to determine suitability and levels of resources required for support. Librarians and other information professionals need to expand their current support for research tools beyond the discovery phase to the entire data lifecycle.

Universities can use this paper to assess their maturity in supporting tools in the data lifecycle. Librarians, in particular, can broaden their knowledge of the various categories of tools which support specific aspects of that lifecycle.

While much attention is currently being focused on supporting researchers with their data management requirements, there is a general lack of literature on how to support tools as a critical element in enhancing research outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to explore whether immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles that hinder effective communication and collaboration. Immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles hindering effective communication and collaboration. VR technologies boost discussion participants' sense of presence and immersion; however, studying emerging VR technologies for their applicability to e-participation is challenging because of the lack of affordable and accessible infrastructures. In this paper, the authors present a novel framework for analyzing serious social VR engagements in the context of e-participation.

The authors propose a novel approach for artificial intelligence (AI)-supported, data-driven analysis of group engagements in immersive VR environments as an enabler for next-gen e-participation research. The authors propose a machine-learning-based VR interactions log analytics infrastructure to identify behavioral patterns. This paper includes features engineering to classify VR collaboration scenarios in four simulated e-participation engagements and a quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach performance.

The authors link theoretical dimensions of e-participation online interactions with specific user-behavioral patterns in VR engagements. The AI-powered immersive VR analytics infrastructure demonstrated good performance in automatically classifying behavioral scenarios in simulated e-participation engagements and the authors showed novel insights into the importance of specific features to perform this classification. The authors argue that our framework can be extended with more features and can cover additional patterns to enable future e-participation immersive VR research.

This research emphasizes technical means of supporting future e-participation research with a focus on immersive VR technologies as an enabler. This is the very first use-case for using this AI and data-driven infrastructure for real-time analytics in e-participation, and the authors plan to conduct more comprehensive studies using the same infrastructure.

The authors’ platform is ready to be used by researchers around the world. The authors have already received interest from researchers in the USA (Harvard University) and Israel and run collaborative online sessions.

The authors enable easy cloud access and simultaneous research session hosting 24/7 anywhere in the world at a very limited cost to e-participation researchers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the very first attempt at building a dedicated AI-driven VR analytics infrastructure to study online e-participation engagements.

This study develops a conceptual framework and a series of instruments for capturing researchers' data-sharing practices in the social sciences, by synergizing the theory of knowledge infrastructure and the theory of remote scientific collaboration.

This paper triangulates the results of three studies of data sharing across the social sciences, with 144 participants in total, and classifies the confusion, “frictions” and opportunities arising from such sharing into four overarching dimensions: data characteristics, technological infrastructure, research culture and individual drivers.

Based on the sample, the findings suggest that the majority of faculty and students in social science research do not share their data because many of them are unaware of the benefits and methods of doing so. Additional findings regarding social scientists' data-sharing behaviors include: (1) those who do share qualitative data in data repositories are more likely to share their research tools than their raw data; and (2) perceived technical support and extrinsic motivation are both strong predictors of qualitative data sharing (a previously underresearched subtype of social science data sharing).

The study confirms the previously hypothesized nature of “friction” in qualitative data sharing in the social sciences, arising chiefly from the time and labor intensiveness of ensuring data privacy.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-03-2020-0079.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution to date and future directions in research data policy, infrastructure, skills development and advisory services in an Australian university, with a focus on the role of librarians.

The authors have been involved in the development of research data services at Griffith, and the case study presents observations and reflections arising from their first-hand experiences.

Griffith University’s organisational structure and “whole-of-enterprise” approach has facilitated service development to support research data. Fostering strong national partnerships has also accelerated development of institutional capability. Policies and strategies are supported by pragmatic best practice guidelines aimed directly at researchers. Iterative software development and a commitment to well-supported enterprise infrastructure enable the provision of a range of data management solutions. Training programs, repository support and data planning services are still relatively immature. Griffith recognises that information services staff (including librarians) will need more opportunities to develop knowledge and skills to support these services as they evolve.

This case study provides examples of library-led and library-supported activities that could be used for comparative purposes by other libraries. At the same time, it provides a critical perspective by contrasting areas of good practice within the University with those of less satisfactory progress. While other institutions may have different constraints or opportunities, some of the major concepts within this paper may prove useful to advance the development of research data capability and capacity across the library profession.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to further develop Paul Edwards’ concept of “data friction” by examining the socio-material forces that are shaping data movements in the cases of research data and online communications data, second, to articulate a politics of data friction, identifying the interrelated infrastructural, socio-cultural and regulatory dynamics of data friction, and how these are contributing to the constitution of social relations.

The paper develops a hermeneutic review of the literature on socio-material factors influencing the movement of digital data between social actors in the cases of research data sharing and online communications data. Parallels between the two cases are identified and used to further develop understanding of the politics of “data friction” beyond the concept’s current usage within the Science Studies literature.

A number of overarching parallels are identified relating to the ways in which new data flows and the frictions that shape them bring social actors into new forms of relation with one another, the platformisation of infrastructures for data circulation, and state action to influence the dynamics of data movement. Moments and sites of “data friction” are identified as deeply political – resulting from the collective decisions of human actors who experience significantly different levels of empowerment with regard to shaping the overall outcome.

The paper further develops Paul Edwards’ concept of “data friction” beyond its current application in Science Studies. Analysis of the broader dynamics of data friction across different cases identifies a number of parallels that require further empirical examination and theorisation.

The observation that sites of data friction are deeply political has significant implications for all engaged in the practice and management of digital data production, circulation and use.

It is argued that the concept of “data friction” can help social actors identify, examine and act upon some of the complex socio-material dynamics shaping emergent data movements across a variety of domains, and inform deliberation at all levels – from everyday practice to international regulation – about how such frictions can be collectively shaped towards the creation of more equitable and just societies.

The paper makes an original contribution to the literature on friction in the dynamics of digital data movement, arguing that in many cases data friction may be something to enable and foster, rather than overcome. It also brings together literature from diverse disciplinary fields to examine these frictional dynamics within two cases that have not previously been examined in relation to one another.

In today's global and competitive corporate environment characterised by rapidly changing information, knowledge and technology (IKT), researchers must be upskilled in all aspects of research data management (RDM). This study investigates a set of capabilities and competencies required by researchers at selected South African public universities, using the community capability model framework (CCMF) in conjunction with the digital curation centre (DCC) lifecycle model.

The post-positivist paradigm was used in the study, which used both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Case studies, both qualitative and quantitative, were used as research methods. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic rules and regulations, semi-structured interviews with 23 study participants were conducted online via Microsoft Teams to collect qualitative data, and questionnaires were converted into Google Forms and emailed to 30 National Research Foundation (NRF)-rated researchers to collect quantitative data.

Participating institutions are still in the initial stages of providing RDM services. Most researchers are unaware of how long their institutions retain research data, and they store and backup their research data on personal computers, emails and external storage devices. Data management, research methodology, data curation, metadata skills and technical skills are critically important RDM competency requirements for both staff and researchers. Adequate infrastructure, as well as human resources and capital, are in short supply. There are no specific capacity-building programmes or strategies for developing RDM skills at the moment, and a lack of data curation skills is a major challenge in providing RDM.

The findings of the study can be applied widely in research, teaching and learning. Furthermore, the research could help shape RDM strategy and policy in South Africa and elsewhere.

The scope, subject matter and application of this study contribute to its originality and novelty.

Starting from the status quo, the paper outlines perspectives and challenges for the connection and interlinking of digitised and digital archival data. The following topics are addressed: Where are fields of action and what are the means of archives? Which functional and technical requirements are to be considered, and what is the role of portal infrastructures linking together various different institutions?

Considering needs of users and general framework conditions, the paper examines new approaches emerging in Germany. It outlines recent projects and considerations aiming to improve services and visibility of archives within the national data infrastructure in Germany.

Cross-connections are no new phenomenon, but change their appearance significantly in a digital context. In this respect, both smaller and bigger archives profit from participation in larger digital networks. Furthermore, archives need to keep in mind to reflect the quality of their digital (meta)data regularly and to offer or join systems that functionally and technically support cross-connection and interlinking of data.

The paper endeavours to show the importance of digital cross-connections and the role of portal infrastructures for visibility, online-distribution and use of digital archival metadata and data.