OUCS Support for Research Projects

For further information, contact rts@oucs.ox.ac.uk.

The Research Technologies Service (RTS) at OUCS offers a range of services to assist staff in planning and carrying out research projects, and in maximizing the impact and sustainability of digital outputs of research. These have been categorised into four sections below relating to various stages of the project lifecycle:

An initial consultation is free to most members of the University. Some of the facilities and services listed here are core services which are provided entirely free to the end user within the University of Oxford. Other services are charged at a set rate. The rates are currently £250 per day for projects internally funded in the University, and the full economic cost (approximately £450 per day) for externally-funded projects. Precise costs will depend on the particular circumstances.

If you are planning a substantial involvement for OUCS then the work must be agreed and costed prior to the submission of the proposal for funding.

1. Planning: designing the technical aspects of the project

RTS offers advice in the following areas of planning your research project:

  1. IT-related funding opportunities (e.g. e-learning, IT infrastructure, etc), supplementing the advice of the Research Services Office and departmental of divisonal research facilitators.
  2. Finding potential partners for collaborative and multidisciplinary projects
  3. Planning the computational aspects of a research proposal
  4. Costing the computational aspects of a research proposal
  5. Pilot and feasibility surveys to develop research proposal
  6. Writing the technical plan of the research proposal
  7. Planning for the sustainability of the project and its digital outputs

2. Starting: setting up the IT for the project

RTS can coordinate advice and support for research projects from OUCS in the following areas:

  1. Recruitment of staff with IT duties
  2. Generic IT training for staff via the OUCS courses
  3. Bespoke technical training
  4. Website design and construction
  5. Hosting websites, databases and servers
  6. Supporting access to GRID, cloud, high performance and supercomputing facilities
  7. IT security
  8. Digitisation and migration of source materials
  9. Arranging access to University services and data for non-University persons
  10. Printing: posters, leaflets, newsletters, business cards

3. Making: doing the work of the project

RTS can coordinate advice and support for research projects from OUCS in the following areas:

  1. Management and coordination of technical work
  2. Support for general IT queries via the OUCS help desk
  3. Backup and archiving for digital data
  4. Sharing data and collaborating online
  5. Managing an online community
  6. Digitisation and migration of source materials
  7. Text encoding and mark-up
  8. Open source software and licensing
  9. Involving the community in your online activities

4. Sustaining: the end of the project and beyond

RTS can help to plan and manage the transition beyond the end of the project funding period, offering advice and support in the following areas:

  1. Data migration
  2. Dissemination and impact: podcasting, maintaining an online presence
  3. Resource discovery and access, linking with other datasets and with the research infrastructure
  4. Advice on business models for ongoing community-based and open source projects
  5. Archiving and long-term preservation of data
  6. Dissemination of project results
  7. Linking research with teaching: integrating research outputs with Weblearn
  8. Printing: reports, newsletters, leaflets

For more information email rts@oucs.ox.ac.uk