What is your background?

In the nineties I started my PhD in parallel to my work in an academic library of law science until I became professor for library management and documentation sciences at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. Since the emergence of the Open Access movement that has significantly changed documentation and communication sciences, I have participated in the digital archive E-LIS about library management and documentation as well as in other projects related to open information. At the moment I am leading a project about research data management that is financed by the national plan of I+D of the Spanish government and that is called “DATASEA” (http://www.datasea.es).

What are the objectives of the Research Data Management Online Course and whom does it address?

The objective of the training course is to offer basic knowledge on how to manage research data. We tried to extract and transmit the essence of what we have learnt during our long experience as professors, technicians and researchers as well as from the latest findings of the DATASEA project. The course’s added value is to offer a first-hand insight into the work with e-sciences and into the interests of various actors within this complex system: scientists, universities, funders, libraries…

This is the first training course that is implemented in Spanish for the information management community in Latin America. As research information is frequently managed directly by researchers, this course does not only address librarians but also young researchers and project managers.

How do you define the “Data Revolution” and which roles play the professionals within the information management area and its further development?

Currently we hear the word “data” in all sectors of our societies. The economic sector is looking for new business models related to the analysis of big data; the public administration and government sectors are trying to provide their data in open and transparent manners (open data); and the technical sector builds the semantic web with protocols that work with linked open data formats. This social movement should be known and followed by professionals who manage information. New developments and emerging possibilities that are enabled by this movement can provide new impulses to our work in the 21^st century. We all know that in this world we have only two possibilities: or we will move forward or we fail.

Will there be more classes related to research data management in the AIMS context in future?

As the work with research data is very complex, we are planning to set up another topic that would be more precise than this introductory course and that could be of interest for the community of information managers and researchers. For this reason, the feedback that we receive in this training course is fundamental for the definition of future educational needs.

It is our wish that our students can discover the latest developments and trends in the area to be able to participate actively in further developments of research data management.