| Source |
https://snd.gu.se/en/catalogue/search |
| Last Updated |
May 26, 2021, 02:34 (UTC)
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| Created |
December 18, 2020, 03:05 (UTC)
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| Country |
Sweden |
| Data Management |
SND has developed a DMP checklist to support researchers in writing a data management plan. It may appear very extensive, as we have divided sections that other templates have grouped together in one category; we have chosen to explain, in some detail, which information is needed and why; and the DMP is intended to be useful in any research discipline. (The latter means that if some information seems irrelevant to your project, it may very well be so.) The data management plan contains seven main sections, associated with how research data are managed in projects: An overview of the project, such as primary investigator, which higher education institution is the research principal, and who in the project team is responsible for what (including to keep the DMP up to date). Management of data deemed worthy of protection, which may contain personal data, information about archaeologically or biologically sensitive locations, data about military objectives etc. Do you need to plan for how to manage these types of data in order to make sure that they don’t fall into the wrong hands? Do you use copyrighted data; if so, how will you manage them? A plan for data collection and production, including to investigate whether there already are datasets produced by others, which can be used in the project. How are you going to document the data material, and according to which routines? Are there any standardised descriptions which are used in your research field? How are you going to organise the data with appropriate file names and logical folder structures? What are you going to do with different versions of datasets? The idea is to make it easy to find the right data. How will you make sure that data are stored in a suitable manner and backed up often and securely enough? There are cost associated with data management, in terms of staff/time, storage, and possibly even for specific software or hardware. If you budget for these costs right from the start, the costs for data management can be included in a possible funding application. How can the data be preserved and made accessible? How are you going to describe them, which prerequisites are there – are there any restrictions on sharing the data? You may early on in the project want to contact the data repository where you plan to make the data accessible, and consult with them on what they request and recommend. |
| Data Policy |
SND strives to make data in the national research data catalogue as compliant as possible with the FAIR criteria, but as a researcher, you also play an important part in this work. Findable: how do you find the data? In order to make a research material compliant with the FAIR data principles, other researchers must be able to find the material. When you present the data in a relevant research data catalogue and make sure that they are described with thorough and relevant metadata (see below), you make it possible for others to find them. In the data description form in the SND system DORIS, you can enter metadata about your research project and its data. You know the project data well, so you are the best person to describe various aspects of the data. When you have submitted your data description, SND or another data repository that complies with the FAIR data principles can give the data a persistent identifier (PID), meaning a permanent and unique digital ID, which makes it easier to cite the data correctly so that they can be found. Metadata Metadata are structured information about the collected data material. This information describes the material on various levels, for example where and by whom it was created; on which occasions and with which methods the data were collected; what a variable means and which values it can take. Metadata are not the same as documentation; what signifies metadata is that they are structured in a way that makes them readable by both humans and computers. Accessible: how do you gain access to the data? The next part of the FAIR data principles concerns access to the data. To share or make a data material accessible is not the same thing as sharing the data freely so that they can be accessed and used by everyone. If the material contains sensitive personal data, or special category data, for example, a confidentiality assessment needs to be made before the material can be released to anyone. Metadata, however, are not sensitive, so even if the data cannot be made freely accessible, you can use metadata to show that the material exists and under which conditions you may access and reuse it. Interoperable: are the data and metadata interoperable? In order to comply with the I in FAIR, both data and metadata need to follow accepted standards. The main responsibility for this rests on the organisation that makes the data accessible (for instance SND). But it also means that you, as a researcher, should use standardised ways to enter information such as dates, time periods, and geographic coordinates, that you select widely adopted scientific vocabularies to describe categories, and that you code variables according to an accepted standard. If possible, you should save the data in a widely used file format that is supported by common operating systems and can be opened in several programs, or use software that can export data in such file formats when the project is finished. Reusable: is it possible for others to use the data in the future? Finally, it should be possible to reuse the data. Some conditions for reusability are that the data are described with sufficient and relevant metadata, that both humans and computers can read the metadata, and that there is clear information about, for instance, the scientific purpose of the study, the context for the data collection as well as which equipment and software were used for the data collection and analysis. You should also clearly specify the conditions for how the data may be used. |
| Data Sharing Principle |
There are some concepts that tend to cause a bit of confusion when you talk about making research data accessible. While research data in the SND research data catalogue have been made accessible, we cannot say that they are all openly accessible, and the terms Open Access and Open Data can also be misunderstood. Open Access Open Access is a term that has been used for quite some time to describe scientific articles and other research publications that are accessible online, free of charge. Some people talk about open access to research data, which can be misleading. Because even though some data may be directly downloaded from a website, other data are only accessible to a limited degree. Furthermore, Open Access can be interpreted as meaning that the data are published in a data journal, which is usually not the case (even though there are a number of data journals that are published with Open Access). Openly accessible data Openly or freely accessible data means that anyone who wants to access the research data can do so, without any restrictions. The most common way of giving open access to research data is by making the data accessible by direct download from a website, such as the SND research data catalogue. However, only some of the data in the SND research data catalogue are openly accessible; the rest are accessible with restrictions. This means that the catalogue post contains information about how you can access the data, but as they may be sensitive in some way, you need to place an order and request access to them. There may even be a mandatory confidentiality assessment before the data can be released to you. Open Data Open data is a term that has come to have diverse meanings, so we advise you to be cautious about using it. Some use open data as a synonym to openly accessible data, as in data that can be freely accessed without any restrictions. On the other hand, when others use Open Data, they mean open government data, data from government agencies which have been made freely accessible. They mean that there is a difference between Open Data (from government agencies) and open research data (from research activities). As some research data cannot be published freely, and as there are different opinions about the meaning of open data/Open Data, SND has decided to use the term accessible data for research data that have been made accessible for reuse. |
