Research involves generating, receiving, collecting and managing data in many forms, ranging from measurements and models to patient records and images. Managing data can be complex, but a little planning at the beginning can help you save time, increase your impact and work more effectively and efficiently.

The next Research IT club will take place on the 21^st Feb and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT helped to improve the treatment of cancer patients in early clinical trials and the introduction of a new service to make research data sharing easier.

One of our research software engineers (RSE), Rob Dunne, has been embedded in a team working to facilitate decision-making for cancer patients who may benefit from experimental treatments in early clinical trials.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers which need to be costed for in research grant proposals. From research software expertise to research sysadmins to research data storage and production of research websites - come along to our clinic on the 15^th of Feb to find out more!

Do you support research through your role in finance, as a technician manager, RBESS or in a support role such as Senior Experimental Officer? If so we want to hear from you! This Research Life Cycle workshop will look at the current state of administrative research support in the area of managing funding: post-award management and closing of award.

The CSF (Computational Shared Facility) and DPSF (Data Processing Shared Facility), the University's flagship HPC systems for compute and high memory work, have been steadily growing over the past 7 years. Approximately 4 million pounds have been invested resulting in over 10,000 CPU cores, over 1PB of scratch and 60TB of RAM being available.

Research IT is currently seeking researchers to attend two Research Life Cycle workshops. The first workshop will aim to establish the current “as-is” model of administrative research support and establish the parameters for change and possible options to enable change. The second workshop will investigate how researchers would like research administration for the University of Manchester to work in the future.

Research IT organises a number of events to keep researchers at The University up to date with our activities and news but is it enough? Does it meet your needs? We would like to know!

Have you heard of Data Carpentry workshops? They are aimed at researchers who have little to no prior computational experience and provide the fundamental data skills needed to conduct the full life cycle of data-driven research. The UoM Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research is currently preparing carpentry materials for the Social Sciences.

We're already looking forward to 2018 here in Research IT with the announcement of our first set of dates for our drop-in sessions.

These sessions are specially designed to help quickly answer any queries, questions or issues you may be having with research IT services including software help, data visualization, research data management, access to HPC resources and much much more.

There have been reports that some researchers are having difficulty accessing journals off campus. Please note that VPN is no longer required to access external publishers’ resources when off campus. Instead this information can be reached via Library Search, Library Access browser extension or direct login on the publisher website. Further information is available in the Knowledge Base article. If you have any further questions please contact the Electronic Resources Helpdesk.

Research IT took part in the latest Digilab meeting at the end of November with the aim of showing off some of our new VR equipment and to demo them to researchers from across the university. A successful day was had with lots of interest in our HTC Vive and Google Daydream VR headsets and their applications in research. There was a mix of researchers who were already using VR in their research in some form to researchers who were trying VR for the first time. Hopefully they left with some inspiration on how VR could be used in their research!