Research Data Management - Legal and Practical Aspects

While transparency about research has always been an integral part of good scientific practice, nowadays more and more research funders and academic publishers also require researchers to archive and share their research data in order to allow other researchers to comprehend or replicate the findings and to (re-)use the data for other purposes. Last but not least, researchers themselves increasingly realize the benefits of sharing research data with others in order to gain academic reputation for the challenging task of producing (re-)usable high-quality research data.

The (re-)usability of research data hinges on a number of factors, including relevant legal aspects, such as data protection and copyright. Researchers thus have to ensure that no legal barriers to (re-)using the data exist and that (re-)use of the data is not hindered by messy, sloppily documented data. Both – addressing legal issues and generating high-quality and well-documented data – are prerequisites of (re-)usability.

The current workshop helps researchers to ensure that their research data is usable within the project and can be safely made available to others. Ideally, these tasks are implemented in the research process without major extra efforts for researchers. For this purpose, the workshop focuses on legal and practical issues of data collection, on basic concepts of data documentation, on secure data storage as well as on sharing the data beyond the research project of origin. Whenever necessary, the workshop pays particular attention to the specific challenges and solutions for quantitative as well as qualitative research data.

The workshop is based on a mixture of presentations and exercises, aiming to increase participants’ awareness, and discussions, to debate concrete problems and experiences. It took place at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany, on June 30th, 2022