Steve McEachern, Director of the UK Data Service, tells us a bit about his background, how he ended up as Director and what role he sees the Service playing in the years ahead.
How did your research and career lead you to become involved in data management and archives?
I started my career in research data management back in 1997, as a research assistant at Monash University in Australia. I had completed my honours degree in commerce and was about to commence my PhD in industrial relations and human resource management, and I worked on data management and metadata projects during my PhD studies.
Following my graduation in 2001, I then moved into an academic position at the University of Ballarat, where I established a survey data collection facility funded through the Australian Research Council.
These two foundations in data collection and data archiving formed the start of a career which has since been oriented to the establishment, development and operation of research data infrastructure. This also influenced my research activity towards survey research and data archiving methods.
In 2009, I was appointed as Deputy Director and subsequently Director of the Australian Data Archive (ADA). Under my direction, ADA provided access for over 12,000 data users around the world to access and use social science data for research and teaching activities across the social science disciplines.
During this time, I also moved more into advisory and policy roles for data support. This included joining the investigator team for the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) and the Australian component of the International Social Survey Programme.
I was elected as Treasurer of the Committee on Data in Science (CODATA) of the International Science Council in 2022, which has involved significant engagement both in Europe and internationally in areas of data policy for research and development.
Why did you want to come and lead the UK Data Service? What were your past experiences of working with the Service?
The UK Data Service has long been seen as one of the leaders in social science data support internationally, and an important international collaborator in our domain.
I’ve been visiting the Service and it’s predecessors for many years, as a part of my work at the Australian Data Archive. When I started at ADA in 2009, we had seconded two members of the UK Data Service team, Karen Dennison and Steve Hassan, to support us in a technical and service delivery investment grant we were leading to improve social science data access in Australia.
Over the next 15 years, we have had regular visits to Colchester and from colleagues at the Service, and joint participation in development efforts like the Dagstuhl workshop series of the DDI Alliance.
As such, the opportunity to come and lead the service is one that I’ve been looking forward to taking up. With the current investment of the new award from the ESRC for 2024-2030, and new developments like the Future Data Services review and National Data Library initiatives, I could see many positive directions for where the Service is heading.
I’m excited to be here now to be able to lead the Service through what is an exciting period in our development and history.
Why is the UK Data Service important as national data infrastructure?
The UK Data Service is one of the foundation research infrastructures in the national research ecosystem in the UK.
Since 1967, when the Social Science Research Council (now ESRC) funded the original Social Science Data Archive at the University of Essex, the Service and its constituent partner organisations – University of Essex, University of Manchester, University College London, University of Edinburgh and Jisc – have provided critical research data to social science researchers in the UK and around the world.
We currently support over 50,000 data users to use over 9,000 different data sets across the social sciences, including access to major government collections such as the UK censuses and national and international macrodata from key international institutions including the International Monetary Fund.
This collection represents the single largest collection of social science research data in the UK, providing a critical resource in enabling UK academic and policy research.
What are your hopes for the Service for the next 10 years?
As we reach 2025, I am always asked “Where do you see the Service in 5 years time? 10 years? 20?”
This is challenging, as the research data landscape is changing at a much more rapid pace than we have been used to, and one challenge is just to keep up with the pace of change. I expect that there will continue to be a critical role for the Service looking 10 years into the future, continuing as the core service providing access to UK social science research data.
I would see however that our role will evolve somewhat from where we have traditionally operated in the past.
We need now to understand our role in the context of a larger research data ecosystem for UK researchers. This is inclusive of both newer ESRC data investments such as Smart Data Research UK and Administrative Data Research UK, and more broadly government and private sector data sources.
We can also expect our user base to continue to extend across research domains, into related domains such as population health and environmental science, and into areas perhaps not even yet imagined or currently in the “too hard basket”.
Core to that is understanding what questions are researchers are seeking to answer, what data do they need to answer their questions, and where and how do they need to access it?
Evolving our service to best support the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of such research, and enabling the multiple forms of access and use that this research will form a challenging but exciting part of our next 10 years of evolution.
About the author
Steve McEachern is the Director of the UK Data Service.
He has previously been Deputy Director and subsequently Director of the Australian Data Archive.
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