Managing Research Data: Gravitational Waves

The MRD-GW project was funded by JISC in 2010–2011 as part of the Managing Research Data programme, to examine the way in which Big Science data is managed, and produce recommendations as appropriate.

JISC also funded a follow-up project, MaRDI-Gross, to support big-science projects in developing suitable Data Management and Preservation (DMP) plans for the data they generate.

Big science data is different: it comes in large volumes, and it is shared and exploited in ways which may differ from other disciplines. The MRD-GW project explored these differences using as a case-study Gravitational Wave (GW) data generated by the LIGO Scientific Consortium (LSC), and produce recommendations useful variously to JISC, the funding council (STFC) and the GW community.

The main project output was its final report, which described the sub-discipline for JISC, provided guidance on data management plans for STFC, and offered a framework for a long-term archive strategy for the GW community.

The project final report includes sections as follows, broadly corresponding to the three audiences we are addressing.

• Sect. 1 is about data management in big science. It is addressed to the JISC and to the data preservation community in general, and is intended to illuminate the ways in which scientists in these areas have distinctive data management requirements, and a distinctive data culture, which contrasts informatively with other disciplines.
• Sect. 2 is primarily addressed to STFC and other similar funders of this type of science. It is concerned with the responsibilities which are imposed on funders by the wider society, and which are passed on to the funded through requirements on the governance of projects and the availability of data. The recommendations here are concerned with how best to express these responsibilities.
• Sect. 3 is primarily addressed to the LSC, as a proxy for similar big- science projects. The explicit recommendations here are intended to be of as much interest to projects, as actions they may wish to take, as to funders, as behaviour it may be prudent or productive to require.
• Finally, Sect. 4 contains conclusions and explicit recommendations.

Project outputs:

• Final report: http://purl.org/nxg/projects/mrd-gw/report.
• Norman Gray and Graham Woan, Digital Preservation and Astronomy: Lessons for funders and the funded. To appear in Evans, I N, et al. (eds), Proceedings of ADASS XX, 2011. arxiv:1103.2318.
• Various workshop presentations.
• Project blog.

The project URL is http://purl.org/nxg/projects/mrd-gw please quote this (rather than the URL it redirects to) when referring to the project.

The project people are Norman Gray, Graham Woan, and Tobia Carozzi.