Colleagues, apologies for cross posting – useful information for Impact as well as of wider interest.

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The April 2016 to March 2017 UK Data Service Annual Report is now available with a fresh new look and feel.

In the year covered by the report the UK Data Service was instrumental in supporting researchers to create shareable and reusable data. In collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the UK Data Service was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to investigate ways to encourage sharing and reuse by examining current attitudes and practices of researchers to open science. To understand issues researchers face when working with challenging data we have also collected experiences from researchers who have deposited data with us in to a series of ‘depositor stories’ as guidance for other researchers.

In 2016 we welcomed our first Data Impact Fellows, a programme which aims to provide career development for early career researchers who use data from the UK Data Service in their work with a focus on impact. We also launched the first Undergraduate Dissertation Prize to recognise and reward undergraduate students who demonstrated flair and originality in using quantitative data available through the UK Data Service for their dissertations.

We have developed new support and resources for teachers and students and launched the UK Data Service Quiz App putting social facts into context for young people. Collaborative training involved us working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as well as international partners the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC), the new Indian Social Science Data Archive and researchers in South Africa working with big data. Our Secure Lab was used to support impactful research and staff at the UK Data Service continued to take part in the working group Safe Data Access Professionals to promote best practice.

2016/17 saw us responding to changes in the national data landscape with involvement in the consultation on data sharing (prior to the Digital Economy Bill), the Concordat Working Group on Open Research and the data and statistical disclosure review of ONS Special Licence Scheme.

We also held our second #DataImpact event, which focused on identifying data solvable challenges and exploring data re-use in policy and research, focussing on impact and innovation we also ran two open Data Dives to work with data in a creative way.

On the technology front, we made ground-breaking data openly available via UKDS.Stat with the inclusion of the Human Rights Atlas and UNESCO data and developed the infrastructure for our big data platform to enable seamless safe access by linking data on physical servers and cloud-based data storage.

The Annual Report can be viewed on our website or downloaded. We hope that users and collaborators will find the Annual Report useful and informative. If you would like a printed version of the Annual Report please contact us at comms@ukdataservice.ac.uk.