Research Repositories
A ResearchOps Community Program of Work
Define the problem being solved by research repositories. To surface different user needs. To develop some resources for the structure of research repositories.
Global leaders: Brigette Metzler, Holly Cole and Mark McElhaw
The Research Repositories Project saw the community create:
- A database of global laws, regulations and policies relevant to User Research.
- A checklist of things to consider when developing a consent form.
- A Consent Form Builder (in BETA only), developed from prototypes produced by the Canadian government and the NSW (Australian State) government, powered by consentkit.io.
Governance of Research is something that continues long after the research is done. Governance can include governance of ethics across an organisation, maintaining and developing appropriate consent forms, including records management of completed consent forms. It is undertaking risk assessments either with or for researchers. It is ensuring safe working environments for researchers. It is information security. ResearchOps includes managing privacy and Non-Disclosure Agreements.
ResearchOps needs to provide researchers with an informed framework for conducting research that is safe, legal and ethical.
Knowledge management is a hot topic in ResearchOps. Knowledge management is heavily intertwined with research governance and the socialisation of research. There are many, many platforms available for researchers to gather, store, synthesise and reuse their research. There are a growing number of platforms for socialising research, and a few that mix between the two.
Knowledge management includes taxonomies, structured vocabularies, librarianship. It includes a strategy and a solution for surfacing and delivering insights and findings to research consumers. A good research repository, corpus or library includes one or more librarians to undertake data gardening and develop a research narrative across the organisation and across research. View the list of existing platforms for gathering, storing, analysing, synthesising and sharing research.
The community is developing relevant content from the Research Repositories Project about knowledge management. The first of these is an Alpha version of a taxonomy for user research. We need your help to iterate this and get it to the next phase!