Open Data is a new paradigm in which research data are freely and openly shared, with full re-use rights. Open data ensures that research integrity is maintained and enables validation of results. Additionally, open data allows the public to access publicly funded research.
Due to the confounding number of requirements from the funders, publishers, and institutions, the open data environment can produce a lot of confusion leading to uncertainty, with different people asking different questions. However, the research data management team are here to help.
Research data includes *all* of the information that is used for research, irrespective of its format. Research data management is simply a term that describes the organisation of research data throughout a project and beyond, including how the research data are protected, stored, and shared. Research data management can essentially be broken down into 3 key aspects advanced planning prior to starting the project effective day-to-day data management during the project a long-term strategy for data preservation after the project is completed
As a research project progresses, research data go through many different stages, illustrated by the research data lifecycle. Thinking about each stage of the data lifecycle at the beginning of a project can help avoid problems later in the project.
A summary of the funder research data management policies.
The Research Councils UK have a set of principles to harmonise the policies of the 7 UK Research Councils.
A data management plan (DMP) is a basic statement describing how the research data will be managed throughout the research project and beyond. A DMP is a useful tool for navigating a project, but should not be viewed as set in stone. It is good practice to review your plan periodically, and revise it if necessary.
DMP online, which has been developed by the Digital Curation Centre, is a webbased tool that contains a number of different data management plan templates relevant for each of the major funding bodies, and provides guidance and suggestions for what to include. DMP online also contains a data management plan checklist, and a range of example data management plans. To use DMP online, you must register with the site, but you can link your account to your Exeter credentials and sign-on using your Exeter single sign-on username and password.
A data access statement is a short statement that describes where and how the data can be accessed, ideally including a link to the data with a persistent identifier.
Creative commons licences provide a simple method to allow copyright permissions to be applied to datasets, ensuring that researchers can get credit for their work, while still allowing others to use, and build upon that work.
Although most funders require data to be preserved in a repository, not all of them provide a specific repository, simply allowing the data to be deposited in any appropriate repository. Subject based repositories are available, and can be found using the registry of research data repositories.
If a suitable subject repository cannot be found, use the University of Exeter s institutional repository, Open Research Exeter (ORE).
Depositing data in ORE is relatively simple. If your dataset <2GB in size, it should be deposited in ORE via Symplectic, using the same procedure as used for publications. For datasets larger than 2GB, you need to use a separate method called the Globus deposit tool.
The Globus deposit tool, accessed via this link, takes you through all of the steps required to deposit your data. Please contact rdm@exeter.ac.uk for assistance depositing large datasets into ORE.
Elsevier and the University of Leiden published results of a study they conducted looking at open data practices in academic research among a sample of almost 1200 researchers.
34% of the researchers surveyed do not publish their data. Only 13% of the researchers are depositing their data in a repository, with 33% appending their data to a publication. However, 73% of the researchers surveyed say that they benefit from having access to other researchers data. We need to shift away from the view of data sharing being seen as an additional component on top of the research process, to being an integral part of the process itself.