Pre-announcement: Future Data Services: Joining up the data service workforce

Upcoming UKRI funding opportunity · Grant. Opens 2027-01-11; closes 2027-04-13. Total fund £2 million. Opportunity page: https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/future-data-services-joining-up-the-data-service-workforce/

Apply for Future Data Services funding to bring together communities of practitioners to exchange knowledge, improve working practices and deliver better data services for researchers.

You must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding.

The total fund available is £2 million at 100% full economic cost (FEC). ESRC will fund 80% of the FEC.

Funding is available for a number of awards for 42 months from 1 October 2027 to 31 March 2031.

This is a pre-announcement and the information may change. More information will be available on this page in due course.

What we're looking for Aim

The aim of this funding is to establish new or support existing communities of practitioners to exchange knowledge, improve working practices and deliver better data services for social science researchers.

Funding will support the creation of collaborative community groups bringing together data service practitioners around common delivery themes, challenges and issues with the aim of identifying how data services can be delivered more effectively.

These groups will provide an opportunity for knowledge exchange and to deliver outputs which will affect real world change.

Through our investment in community groups the following outcomes are expected:

- connected communities of data service professionals who work together to address shared challenges in areas of data service delivery to support the transition to a more federated landscape. This could include, but is not limited to, curation and metadata, data access, data linking, duplication reduction, harmonised approaches, transparency and statistical disclosure control

- improved experiences for researchers, including consistent, easy to understand and…