As I’ve already mentioned, the focal point for a lot of the pilot work in Research360 is the Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) in Sustainable Chemical Technologies. This presents us with some interesting opportunities and challenges, and is well worth investigating: DTCs (or CDTs depending on the research council) are fast becoming the norm for PhD funding in these straitened times.

A Doctoral Training Centre is typically formed by the award of a large grant to a university or consortium to strengthen a particular area of research excellence. This funding covers the cost of training a large number of PhD students in cohorts over a period of several years including the infrastructure and administration requirements. The expectation is that other funding sources will be found and the centre will become self-sustaining.

As an example, our DTC in SCT is funded by the EPSRC for 5 cohorts of 10-15 students. It’s a 4-year integrated PhD course, which begins with an MRes year followed by 3 years of more conventional PhD research. The MRes year involves a lot of generic and specialist training alongside two short research projects, one of which may lead into the main PhD project.

In line with the current culture in science, our research is strongly interdisciplinary, involving both chemists and chemical engineers, along with biologists, mathematicians, mechanical engineers and others.

Funding doctoral training in this way has a number of benefits. Because we recruit in cohorts which all start together at the beginning of the academic year, we have groups of students who all work and train together. Not only is this more efficient in terms of the training courses that we provide, it also means that the students are able to support each other through the challenging transition from undergraduate to professional scientist.

For Research360, this is great, as we’re able to provide RDM training to a whole cohort together, and they can (and will, in my experience) support each other as they develop data management plans at the same point in the PhD process.

Because Doctoral Training Centres are well funded and provide a consistent source of high quality students to work on projects, academics are motivated to engage with them. And because DTCs are typically highly interdisciplinary, these academics and their collaborators will be spread right across the institution, or a whole consortium. This gives us many opportunities to roll out good data management practice organically institution-wide. If our researchers in the centre routinely practice good RDM, they will expect it of their collaborators elsewhere in the University.

Furthermore much of the administration, such as project proposals and transfer reports, still gets processed through the graduate schools in the Faculties of Science and Engineering & Design. By having our students include data management plans in this documentation, we can get it onto the radar of the graduate schools from below as well as above.

This approach is not without its problems however. Many of the features which make the DTC model work so well also mean that they are generally not representative of the institution as a whole. There are still many PhD students funded by specific research projects or institutional studentships who may have begun their studies at any point in the academic year, and training developed for DTC students may not be as appropriate for these.

Whatever the advantages and disadvantages, I look forward to exploring the potential of using our doctoral training centre as a catalyst to improve data management here at the University of Bath. It would be great to hear from anyone facing similar issues.