NERC Science Information Strategy

Managing Progress

Success

The success criteria for the programme have been laid out within the strategy and implementation plan. The criteria cover a number of key areas:

Data acquisition

NERC and its community will understand what data NERC wishes to curate for the long-term and why.
Clear guidelines will exist to guide a NERC funded Principal Investigator as to:
- how to successfully address data management in a bid to NERC
- how to manage data during the life of the grant
- how NERC data centres will support them at each stage

Data curation

Data curation and conditioning practices across NERC's data centres will be optimised to enable simple information access and exploitation for stakeholders requiring data from across a range of NERC's data centres, without significantly compromising the needs of the stakeholder communities served from only one.
NERC will identify (or set) the appropriate international standards for information management and demonstrate that it meets them.

Information exploitation and access

NERC and its data centres will lead the UK environmental science community in complying fully with the requirements of the INSPIRE directive.
NERC will provide appropriate routes of access and consistent charging regimes for its range of data holdings to all stakeholder communities (ie science, government, regulators, private, public and voluntary sectors).
NERC will work with other UK and international bodies to provide users with the ability to access location based data across a range of providers.

Organisation and funding

NERC data centres are clearly established to serve the integrated NERC communities described in 'Next Generation Science for Planet Earth', and will be funded to a defined service level.
NERC data centres are funded transparently in relation to the national capability (including national good), research programme and responsive mode support that they give.
NERC will be compliant with all legislation, and actively influence future UK and EU policy concerning data management.

Metrics and indicators

Appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) and user feedback mechanisms will be used to demonstrate data centre excellence, assess policy compliance, support benchmarking and drive continuous improvement, within financial constraints.
Appropriate management information will be generated to show the totality of the data centres' activities where they are broadly like-for-like, particularly in data acquisition and information access/exploitation.

Governance

Progress on each of the projects is routinely reported to the Strategy Implementation Board (SIB) who hold responsibility for the successful implementation of the SIS.

For further information please contact:

Mike Brown
Programme Manager
Tel: 01524 595953