A Users' Guide to Economical Digital Data Usage

As research data management continues to grow in importance, ever larger volumes of research data are being generated. This development, which is welcome in itself, leads to technical and organizational challenges not only in the area of research data storage, but in all phases of the research data life cycle. Against this background, this article explains possible motivations behind digital data economy with regard to organizational, technical and ethical criteria, data protection and sustainability. Against the background of central challenges, suggestions for implementation are then made for the preliminary stages and the course of a research project. Basic recommendations on digital data minimization are also provided.

A shorter edition of the guidelines was published in May 2024 in the journal o | bib (in German): https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/6036 

This edition contains an additional chapter (4.2) with specific practical examples. It is a translation of the German article:

Heber, M., Jakob, M., Landwehr, M., Leendertse, J., Müller, M., Schneider, G., von Suchodoletz, D., & Ulrich, R. (2024). Leitfaden zur digitalen Datensparsamkeit (mit Praxisbeispielen). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11445843