# e-Research Survey 2025

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## Slides

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### Motivation

1. feedback on existing services / support
2. increase awareness
3. guide strategy development and future work
4. evidence need for growth
5. increase academic profile

- Focus on feedback and future work
- Awareness and outputs will happen if we do it well
- Make modules relevant here core modules
- Others optional?

#### Outcomes we expect/want to pass up to senior leadership

- Gaps in provision - are we missing things?
- Free text - unknown unknowns
- What do people want going forward?
- Measuring what we do?
- Are we doing it well? e.g. do our answers meet your needs?
- Don't want to ask about time to close tickets - don't want that to be our metric
- Do you want more of it?
- Feedback on specific services

### Comms

- RMN event on 21st/22nd May
- Probably too soon at this point
- Ask them to pass it on when it comes
- e-Research Wednesday May block a couple of hours in the afternoon
- Bring all our parts together
- Review
- Port to Qualtrics
- Bare bones

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### Modules

- Route people through questions only for services they use / have views on

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### Demographics

Who are you?

- Faculty
- Career stage
- Job role

Discussion in the meeting:
- Do we want to ask different questions to different parts of the audience?
- e.g. technicians / academics
- Target all 'researchers' and facility technicians
- Catching people in hybrid roles like us
- What do we do with research managers?
- Maybe exclude here?

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### Your work

- What do you do?
- What e-Research services do you use?
- Data / software creation and use

Discussion in the meeting:
- Ethical risk asking about data storage
- Mitigate by not asking too specific - "local storage solution"
- Ask what are the barriers to central storage? Making sure there is a way to do the right thing
- New data risk model - have you checked your data with this?
- Anonymity
- Balance between utility and anonymity - willingness to provide criticism
- Options for:
- "You can contact me"
- "You can use my LDAP record"

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### Satisfaction and Awareness

- Do you know what we do?
- How do you feel about it?

#### Each service

- Get service lead to write initial set of questions for each
- Then harmonise
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- Any other comments? free text

##### Ops

- Do people want videos?
- What's the quality of our communication through various mechanisms?
- Tickets, docs, etc

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## Motivation

Multiple purposes for running this survey:

1. feedback about our existing systems, platforms and support
2. increase awareness about e-Research - via laptop prize
- people who could use our services, but don't
3. input and steer to assis with strategic- and forward-planning
- what do people want / need
- what tech is coming our way in the future?
4. evidence to Bry / Bashir for expansion / funding
5. publishing report supports further research and increases our academic profile

Aims:

- 500 respsonses
- drive more adoption of our systems and support

## Eligability

We want this to be representative of the research community at King's. Need some way of filtering.

- Filter by comms lists
- All faculties
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## Ethics

We're classified as "minimal risk" according to [the documentation](https://internal.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/governance-ethics-integrity/research-ethics/stored-documents/3applications/1index/what-is-the-risk-level-of-my-project.pdf), so only need to register our survey in REMAS to receive automatic approval within 24 hours.

See [guiding principles document](https://internal.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/governance-ethics-integrity/research-ethics/stored-documents/3applications/minimal-risk/minimal-ethical-risk-guiding-principles.pdf) for information on consent and participant information.

## Survey Modules

### Consent

### Demographics

The purpose of this section is to make sure the responses we receive are representative of the college and to look for differences in experience between groups.

- Which faculty(s) are you based in?
- Purpose: check proportional representation
- Type: select multiple, custom other
- Responses
- ...
- What is your current career stage?
- Purpose: check proportional representation and understand userbase
- Type: select one
- Responses
- ...
- What is your job family?
- Purpose: understand userbase
- Type: select multiple
- Responses
- ...

### Your work

- Short summary of their work
- Do you manage or generate research data in your role?
- What tools do you use?
- How much data do you generate?
- Where do you host it?
- Notes: this question will give us a list of people who are potentially storing sensitive data in inappropriate places. This may bump up our ethics requirement to a full application.
- Do you develop your own code?
- Do you use commercial software packages?
- Where do you access e-Research services from?
- Purpose: prioritise time spent on infra development to support these routes
- Type: ranked importance
- Responses:
- KCL campus network
- e-Research VPN
- Home
- etc.
- Something to understand expectations wrt. recent storage outage
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- Do you have responsibility over the work of others? e.g. PI / PhD supervisor

### Service awareness and satisfaction

- Are you aware of the following services provided by e-Research?
- Purpose: check awareness of what we do - where do we need to focus comms improvement?
- Type: grid
- Questions
- ...
- Responses
- ...

- To what extent are you satisfied with the following:
- Purpose: understand how services are received
- Type: grid
- Questions
- ...
- Responses
- ...

- Please rate your satisfaction with the range of methods we may use to communicate with you
- Purpose: assess success of comms strategy especially where tied to services
- Type: grid
- Questions
- ...
- Responses
- ...

- Directly reference HPC scratch outage
- How does this impact on general satisfaction - reliability will be one of the satisfaction axes
- Mitigate recency bias
- Prompt for satisfaction "excluding recent scratch outage"
- Split satisfaction into multiple factors e.g. reliability, capacity / wait time
- Relibility
- Capacity
- Support
- Documentation
- Training (could be its own)

### Looking forward

### Software use and development

Questions from Southampton survey
- Do you use research software?
- How important is research software to your work?
- Have you developed your own research software?
- Commercialisation?
- Ready to share?
- How do you rate your software development expertise
- Sufficient training?
- Confidence with version control
- Confidence with unit testing
- Confidence with continuous integration
- Included software development in funding proposal
- _Hired to develop software_
- _Recruit full-time developer_
- _Recruit from central pool_

### Misc

- Do you have any other feedback for us? If so, please share it here
- Type: free-text, optional
- Can we follow-up with you about your responses?