Getting Through the Maze – Reusable Strategies and Tools for Research Data Management

Research data is part of a digitization process in science, which challenges aspects of the scientific work such as reproducibility, re-use or sustainability. Professional management of digital research data is an essential prerequisite for effective and excellent research.

In our project five universities have been creating strategies, roadmaps, guidelines and open access material for an exceptional research data management infrastructure. They bundle their experience and expertise working on the four main tasks: strategy development, legal issues, policy development, and competence enhancements.

All the project outcomes are easy to re-use models and instructions. One can find amongst others a self-evaluated strategy for research data management based on the know-how of the co-operation partners and using the resources provided by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). Another outcome is the component and level based policy kit that helps to create an own research data policy, and guidelines that accompany the universities with the strategical implementation of it. To support the research data coordinators (stewards / trainers) one can use the full train-the-trainer concept on RDM. It includes a book with the contents on RDM as well as the full teaching scripts, a huge amount of exercises and methods that show how to teach the topic, slide shows, hand-outs, check-lists and more. Complementary, guidelines and recommendations on legal issues are published. All these outcomes are freely accessible under the CC-BY 4.0 international license.

The objective of the collaborative work is to make sure that the introduction of a research data management at universities (or other educational institutions) is efficient and easy to conduct.