Despite the inevitable funding cuts that austerity budgets bring, it's really not a bad time to be a UK researcher - lots of organisations want to help you manage and share your data.

If you have ever wanted an electronic laboratory notebook, now might be a good time to get one.

Increasing research impact is the new Holy Grail for researchers. Since high profile researchers tend to get more grants and enjoy greater opportunities for collaboration, it makes sense for researchers to promote themselves as widely as they can - even if this seems like shameless self-promotion.

TARDIS is a multi-institutional collaboration that facilitates the archiving and sharing of data and metadata pertaining to crystallography. TARDIS offers a free data packaging tool for organising and annotating data, and for creating localised repositories.

Data Fabric is a service offered by Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS). "The system is available to all Australian researchers and free within stated limits." It is easy to use and is a great collaboration tool.

Thinking of submitting a proposal to the $47m National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NecTAR) project?

Thinking of submitting a proposal to the $47m National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NecTAR) project? If so, have a look at the video on submitting your proposal.

Brainstorming, writing, citing, editing - these are all phases in writing a book or article, and co-authoring can be done with traditional tools such as word processing and dedicated face to face contact. If you want to write with others, but are time-poor, tradtional tools can be limiting. Enter cloud-based tools that allow each writer to contribute when they can, where they can.

New research collaboration tools are being released all the time. For example, you can find a list of existing tools here.