The Medical Research Council in the UK annually invests around £700 million of public money in research, the primary output of which is data.

The National Science Board has recently issued a report, Digital Research Data Sharing and Management, from their Task Force on Data Policies. The Board is calling for comments.

In the US, 2.5 petabytes of data are stored annually just for mammograms.

The volume of earth-observation data from the European Space Agency's satellites passed three petabytes in 2007. The projection for 2020? A seven-fold rise.

Data management and data sharing, while necessary and desirable, are not cost-free. But how are such costs to be estimated?

If you want free online training in managing research data, then Research Data MANTRA may be the site for you. It is a course designed for PhD students and anyone else who needs to plan a research project using digital data. The course is modular. Existing sections include:

Think about when disaster strikes. An earthquake. A tsunami. News and information online generally appear very quickly in a variety of ways - through Facebook, blogs, tweets, YouTube, news feeds and web sites. The result? Atomisation.

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.

DMTpsych was created to develop research data management capacity and skills within psychology postgraduates. The program is freely available online and comprises postgraduate training for research data management in the psychological sciences.

Pre-fieldwork PhD, Master's students and early career researchers in social anthropology will find good advice on research practices in their discipline here. The advice is presented in three modules: