Research Data Management

Please notice that this guide is being updated during spring 2023.

The University of Lapland has an open science policy concerning also datasets:

In principle the datasets produced in our university, funded by public funds and used for published research output should be opened if it isn't prevented by contracts, ethical reasons or the interests of the university or the research subjects.

By publishing/sharing datasets or descriptions of datasets, researchers will benefit from:

• Expansion to the scale and impact of research: Research data can be cited by other researchers which can amplify your research impact.
• Increased collaboration and reduced duplication: Your research datasets become more discoverable thus making other researchers aware of your research.
• Research integrity: The validity of research results can be substantiated.
• Future applications: Research data preservation allows for the application of developing analytical technologies within a field of research.

Not all data can be shared due to legal, ethical, or practical reasons.  Restrictions due to privacy, confidentiality, security or intellectual property can be valid reasons for restricting data.  If this is the case this must be explicitly addressed in the data management plan.

Choosing an archive for your data

Order of priority when choosing a research data repository:

1. A repository complying with the standards of your own discipline
2. A repository of your own research organization (The University of Lapland has no repository)
3. A generic scientific repository, e.g. Zenodo
4. Some other repository

Finnish data archives and services

Other data archives and services

Help finding the archive

Persistent identifiers identify online resources (such as datasets) by providing a permanent link to them. Even if the data changes location on the Internet, the identifier remains the same and will still link to the data, regardless of the new location. Thee common types of persistent identifiers are DOI (Digital Object Identifier), URN and Handle e.g.:

• doi:10.1007/s00300-017-2139-7
• URN:NBN:fi:ula-201709081296
• hdl:10138/201585

When archiving data to a repository, the repository will provide unique identifiers.

You can usually create a permanent address by using the PID's. The  addresses to the above PID's would be:

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00300-017-2139-7
• http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:ula-201709081296
• http://hdl.handle.net/10138/201585