About ReStore

What is it?

ReStore is a repository of research methods websites funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), mostly prior to 2010, through initiatives such as the Research Methods Programme (RMP), Researcher Development Initiative (RDI), Quantitative Methods Initiative (QMI) and the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM). The ReStore project was funded in two phases from 2007 until 2013 before becoming a part of NCRM.


How were resources selected?

Web resources for inclusion in ReStore were subject to academic and technical reviews before acceptance. Review processes were developed by the ReStore team in consultation with an external advisory group.


Where are they now?

Resources selected for maintenance were transferred to a web architecture hosted by NCRM for ongoing support. In some cases, external service providers were commissioned to do the required work. The entire collection was maintained online until 2022 and during this period was viewed over 2 million times!


Following a review in 2022, the decision was taken to retire the least-used resources and to transfer the most popular ones into a new ReStore site. The retained resources are listed on the home page. Details and key documents from the retired legacy resources are listed separately. Retained documents are held within the NCRM Eprints repository and linked from each project page.


Is there any guidance for online resource developers?

The ReStore project team created guidance for web resource creators, some of which was embedded into ESRC’s guidance for award-holders. The ReStore guidance materials can be accessed here restore.ac.uk/guidance/. While the general principles are still sound, any reference to specific standards or browser versions will now be dated.


What is its status now?

We are no longer adding to the ReStore project archive. It has become necessary to disable some of the original functionality of these pages, for example where they were based on outdated web technologies or standards and had become insecure or inaccessible. The content is no longer actively maintained.


Accessibility

The ReStore content was created using a variety of web technologies, before contemporary accessibility standards and browsers. Users will therefore find that there are elements of these resources that are no longer fully accessible. These sites are best viewed on a desktop computer rather than a mobile device. NCRM had applied reasonable best efforts to improve the accessibility of the legacy materials. Our Accessibility statement is linked from the footer of every page.


Licensing

The ReStore content was authored prior to the current UKRI open access policy and is not owned by NCRM. The resources were each licensed to be hosted in the NCRM ReStore repository. Any specific terms of use associated with each individual resource can be found by clicking “About this resource” at the top right hand side of any resource page. These should be read in association with the general ReStore Disclaimer and legal notices linked from the footer of every page.


Contact

The original ReStore project team were Prof Chris Skinner, Prof David Martin, Prof Jane Seale, Dr Katy Sindall, Arshad Khan and Kaisa Puustinen. Details of how to contact the current NCRM team can be found via the Contact page.