Research Data Management

The management of research data refers to creating and storing research data and related descriptive metadata so as to preserve the usability and reliability of the material, taking into account confidentiality and data protection issues throughout the lifespan of the data. Good data manaagement means, that you:

• Ensure the quality of your own work
• Facilitate your own work, especially if something causes a pause in your work (maternity leave, sick leave, intensive teaching period etc.)
• Facilitate the work of your cooperators or your possible successor
• Save time
• Fulfill the requirements of the research funders
• Fulfill the requirements of the GDPR if you are using personal data in your research
• Enable opening your data for reuse in your or other researchers’ future projects

Source: FSD Data management guidelines CC BY 4.0

Data management issues are discussed also on the web pages produced by The Finnish National Board of Research Integrity TENK and The Committee for Public Information TJNK:

National services for data management:

A proper data management plan will help you manage your data during the project and meet the requirements of your funder and also helps you and others reuse the data.

DMPTuuli is an online tool that makes easier to write and update a data management plan.

A  data management plan should specify

• What kinds of data are collected or reused?
• How will the data be documented and its consistency and quality be controlled and documented?
• How will the data be stored and backed up and how will you control access to keep the data secure?
• How will ethical issues and copyright and Intellectual Property Right (IPR) issues be managed?
• How, when, where and to whom the data will be made available and how and where the data with long-term value will be made available and what are the estimated costs in time and effort to prepare the data for preservation and sharing?

You can ask for help in creating a data management plan from

• tietopal [at] ulapland.fi

Model DMPs

You can find public DMPs for using as examples in dmpTuuli by clicking "References".

The Finnish Social Science Data Archive has produced wide and thorough Data management Guidelines and also updated it according to GDPR. The FSD guidelines include in-depth instructions on informing research participants and anonymisation of personal data. That's why those issues are not included in these instructions of the University of Lapland.

OpenAire - the EU’s instructions on research data management