A 'Railway Guide' Through the Research Process? A Librarian's Quest to Create an Overview of All Available Research Support

At Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, research support is offered in researchers’ faculties, that is, the research-performing units, and at a central level across different divisions, such as the University Library, IT, financial services , grants advice, and the legal department. For researchers, it is often unclear where they should go with questions, who, or what resources, can help them to comply with various requirements, or even why a step is necessary, useful, or good for Open Science.

This is why, in 2021, the University Library took the initiative to create an overview of each research-support-related step that a researcher can take throughout the research process. The University Library is uniquely positioned to create this overview, because it coordinates the university-wide support network for Research Data Management (RDM) and Open Science, it hosts and supports several research applications, and it is the host of the Research Data Management Support Desk, the central helpdesk for all the university’s researchers. The Library therefore plays a central role in engaging researchers and research support staff with RDM, Open Science and other research policies, and fostering collaboration between these colleagues.

The research process overview divides the research process into steps, starting before a grant proposal is written, and ending after the research has been published and data have been deposited in a repository. For each step, the overview shows why, how, where and when a particular step can or must be taken and where a researcher can find support for that step. The steps range from asking for grants advice to publishing data, and from arranging insurance for research participants to setting up a version control system for writing research software; some steps also refer users to other steps. For these reasons, the resulting document is overwhelming, fear-inducing and hard to navigate.

Yet, it is useful. For as far as we know, it is the only document in the university that systematically describes all the research steps and the available support. It is not only helpful for researchers, but also for research support staff who may not be familiar with all the services in the institution. Since 2021, the document has also seen several updates to reflect changes in the support infrastructure, and was used as a source for a project that aims to connect several ‘moments’ of research support, to ease the researcher’s path.

In this presentation, I will show not only the document itself, but also how I went about building it, how I applied Open Science principles to both the creation process and the eventual result, the projects for which the overview was used, how we tried to communicate about the existence of the overview, and what plans we have to work it out more towards a resource that is easier to use. All in all, this document is also a testimony to the unique position of the University Library and the crucial role that it can occupy in (shaping) the research support process.