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:

Advice on data management is always more useful when it is discipline-specific. The Archaeology Data Service has produced a modular guide, Managing Research Data in Archaeology, that does just that.

Universities worldwide are increasingly driven by the need to improve their research performance. This involves attracting, supporting and retaining the best researchers. The provision of good facilities and good research support helps keep good researchers from leaving.

Citizen science, also known as crowdsourcing, is on the increase, and is being written about in scholarly journals.