Your role: Researcher

Introduction

Your research data is a major output from your research project, it supports your research conclusions, and guides yourself and others towards future research. Therefore, managing the data well throughout the project, and sharing it, is a crucial aspect of research.

Data management responsibilities

Data management includes actions throughout all stages of the research process.

In your role of researcher, you may need to:

Write a data management plan;
Estimate the costs of data management for a grant application;
Ensure your data complies with ethical, policy and legal requirements;
Store your data securely, in a resource that is sustained and accessible;
Use metadata standards and documentation methods for your data;
Get training about data management, including the use of data management tools and data archives.

Data management guidance

RDMkit pages

The RDM life cycle pages give an overview of how to approach data management tasks.
Data management plan guides you through writing a data management plan.
Costs of data management helps you budget for your project.
Compliance helps you comply with the institution policy, including the legal and ethical aspects.
National resources give country-specific guidance and resources.
Documentation and metadata helps you document data and choose the appropriate metadata standards.
Data publication guides to find a data repository for your needs.

Other resources

Contact the data steward in your local organisation or your national contact in the ELIXIR network.
Your institution may have web pages about RDM and support services available. They may also give you in-person advice and provide training.
The Turing Way handbook to reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science offers guidance to researchers in academia, industry and the public sector.
FAIR Cookbook gives step by step recipes to complete common data management tasks.
Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) guides through creating a data management plan.
FAIRification Framework guides through making your data FAIR.
TeSS is a life science training portal, where you can search for training courses or materials on data management.
FAIRsharing is a portal where you can search for databases, standards and policies.
FAIR Principles gives an overview of how to make your data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).
23 Things provides links to a range of useful resources on data management.

Contributors