How collaboration is instrumental at the University of Oslo to achieve goals related to research data management (RDM)

At the University of Oslo, cross-departmental collaboration on strategic development and solutions development is critical to achieving progress in a time of limited resources and rapid change. The department of research administration, the university center for information technology and the university library currently collaborate and coordinate their activities in order to ensure best practices for research data management at the university. We acknowledge that collaboration across these groups is challenging. Examples of challenges are issues with language related to the different professions' terminologies; different cultures and priorities within fields (e.g. the IT department focuses on infrastructure, IT-security, and storage, while the library focuses on archiving and management, while the research office focuses on policy and legal matters). Why is it still beneficial to collaborate then? There are several answers to this. Firstly, we find that working together makes gaining impact within the institution easier. By making the case together, we can emphasize the importance of RDM both to university management and the researchers and departments. At the same time, we are able to ascertain what activities taking place across the collaborating departments are well-coordinated and can be joined up if necessary. By the time of the conference, we also aim to have established a cross-institutional network of research data support workers, providing a networking forum and, we hope, enabling knowledge exchange and cross-departmental collaboration across the institution. The latter is very important as the institution is facing cuts caused by the national de-bureaucratization reform and finding fresh resources to ascertain good RDM support is very difficult. In our presentation, we will talk more about the issues described above, share more of our experiences and also discuss some of our achievements with RDM so far