Background

We feel that ADMIRAL is making some very positive steps to support researchers' data management:

the simplicity of our basic model - i.e. file sharing - for capturing data from researchers is well received.
we have developed and deployed lightweight, solutions for capturing researchers datasets, submitting them to the Library Databank Service, and feeding back the results of said submission to the researchers. Importantly, the set-up effort for researchers is very small: no special software is required to be installed on researchers own computers: all features are accessed via file sharing and web browsing.
we are just staring to get concrete feedback from researchers about how we should evolve our initial front-to-back data curation offering. The first researcher we spoke to suggested that if we overcome some simple operational issues (mainly disk capacity!) that he would already be submitting all of his datasets to the library Databank service for preservation.
we are engaging with external digital preservation and related research communities. We are planning to test our ADMIRAL deployment through partnership with another EU funded project from our group, Wf4Ever [1]. We will use ADMIRAL and its user base as the test bed for outputs from the Wf4Ever project, such as the modelling of Research Objects and provenance.

Set against these positive notes is the fact that we are about 5 months late late (compared with the original plan) getting the full front-to-back system deployed with our research users. As a result, we are only just starting to trial our front-to-back system with researchers and, while initial feedback has been very positive, are not yet in a position to show concrete impact on researchers' activities.

A tentative business case outline

We feel that our work is part of a much wider e-science activity to improve the management and status of research datasets as an academic output, shared by many projects (e.g. DataCite, Dryad, myExperiment, Wf4Ever, to name but a few). The broad business case for shared research data, and the impediments to realizing the benefits, are documented in some detail by a Nature article,Empty archives by Bryn Nelson [2]. While the scale of the ADMIRAL project is such that it can't hope to deliver the desired benefits all on its own, it does address several of the issues described in the Empty archives article. Specifically:

"When the time came, scientists couldn't find their data, or didn't understand how to use the archive, or lamented that they just didn't have any more hours left in the day to spend on this business".
ADMIRAL aims to make acquisition of data at source as easy as possible for the researchers ("sheer curation"); we will show progress on this front by having having real research datasets lodged in an institutional repository from small research groups for whom the obstacles described are particularly acute.
"But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers' concerns. What will keep work from being scooped, poached or misused? What rights will the scientists have to relinquish?"
ADMIRAL aims to address this by allowing researchers to (a) retain control over exactly what is published after submitting data to the repository service for preservation, and (b) to specify embargo periods so that they have time to publish their own results based on the data without being scooped. The general theme here is that we retain researchers' trust by not wresting control of their data away from them. We will show this by having research data sets approved for publication, with or without an embargo specified, but it is hard to expect this to be demonstrated within the time-frane allotted to the ADMIRAL project. As a secondary aim, we might gather indications of willingness in principle to share specified datasets in dues course.
"Where will they get the hours and money to find and format everything?"
ADMIRAL aims to make progress in this direction by providing tools that simultaneously provide useful views of the data and acquire the information about the data that makes those views possible ("curation by addition"). We will show progress in this goal by having examples of additional metadata lodged with datasets that have been collected as the researcher analyzes and organizes their data to support a paper publication. This is a large topic, and any progress in this area cannot be more than indicative.
"All too many observations lie isolated and forgotten on personal hard drives and CDs, trapped by technical, legal and cultural barriers"
ADMIRAL does not directly address legal or cultural barriers, but progress on the technical barriers will be demonstrated through the same mechanisms as (1) above.
"How data should be shared is also a substantial problem. A prime example is the issue of data standards: the conventions that spell out exactly how the digital information is formatted, and exactly how the contextual information (metadata) is listed."
ADMIRAL doesn't address the issue of standards for primary data, but does use standard formats and vocabularies for the descriptive metadata. This will be shown through deposited datasets having associated metadata that allows a single query to retrieve information about multiple deposited datasets.
"Another issue facing journals and data banks is how to ensure proper citations for data sets."
ADMIRAL addresses this by working with the British Library to provide for DOIs to be assigned to published datasets, through its engagement with the DataCite project. This will be demonstrated by having datasets published with assigned DOIs which can be cited by papers and other datasets. Even better would be for such a published dataset to actually be cited, but that is unlikely to happen within the timeframe of the current JISC project.