Nucleus - Deploying Research Data Management Infrastructure At The Los Alamos National Laboratory

Research data management (RDM) efforts, including the implementation of tools, development of best practices, and training of scholars, have taken center stage in many academic libraries. Evaluating and serving the RDM needs at federally funded organizations have also become a priority since the release of the 2013 U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy memo. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, the Research Library has launched a collaborative data management pilot called "Nucleus", based on a local installation of the open source software Open Science Framework. In this poster we present a preliminary assessment of Nucleus' implementation, including user feedback and lessons learned.

1 Introduction

In 2013, the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director issued a memo directing U.S. federal agencies with more than 100 million U.S. Dollars in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally funded research publicly available [3]. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) receives approximately 12 billion U.S. Dollars in R&D funding, resulting in over 50, 000 scientific and technical products annually. As a result, the DOE crafted a Public Access Plan in 2014 [2] committing to make DOE data and scholarly publications available through publicly accessible portals such as DOE PAGES¹

https://www.osti.gov/pages/

. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), being a DOE laboratory, has various initiatives with an eye towards the status of research data management at the laboratory. To aid these efforts, the Research Library conducted interviews with LANL staff regarding their research data needs in 2015 [1]. By far the most common need cited by researchers was data storage. Several participants expressed variations of sentiments such as “Data is mostly stored on everyone's individual computer. I did set up a drive on the shared drive for us to at least share images and files. There is no long-term storage solution” [1]. Enhanced collaboration and security compliant infrastructure was also highly desired [1]. These results track closely to a similar survey done at LANL in 2011, making it apparent that data management needs remained consistent at LANL in terms of data storage, research collaboration, and research data dissemination.