UK higher education institutions have come under increasing pressure to manage the data generated by their researchers that cannot be curated by subject-based data centres and repositories ‒ and many were unsure how to do this, given the absence of advice, examples and good practice.

Accordingly, JISC's Managing Research Data programme funded 8 Research Data Management Infrastructure (RDMI) projects to provide the UK Higher Education sector with examples of good research data management.

The projects identified requirements to manage data created by researchers within an institution, or across a group of institutions, and then piloted research data management infrastructures at institutional, departmental or research group level, to address these requirements.

The programme's report, Benefits from the infrastructure projects in the JISC Managing Research Data programme, provides an analysis and synthesis of the benefits from this work. Key benefits (illustrated by case studies) include :

• Ability to cite shared data
• Integrated thinking around research data management
• Co-ordinated support for research
• Research efficiency, rapid access to data
• Clear and accessible guidance
• Improving data management plans, policies and institutional settings
• Cost savings through centralisation and virtualisation