Lesson plan 15: Research data management – overview and best practices

FAIR elements: All

Primary audience(s):

This lesson is intended to deliver a concise overview of the research data management (RDM) principles and practices for master's degree students or professional audiences of vocational education and training.

Learning outcomes:

  • Understanding the RDM process and main use cases

  • Understanding Open Research and Open Data (definition, standards, Open Data use and reuse, open government data, European policies and initiatives)

  • Understanding FAIR principles in research data management, maturity model and compliance

  • Working with sensitive, personal or private data (General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] and its requirements, ethics approval process and form)

  • Understand what a data management plan is, its purpose and benefits for a project or organisation

  • Know tools, guides, templates to support RDM, metadata management, DMP creation

  • Apply the acquired knowledge in practice, namely be able to create a DMP, create and publish data and metadata

  • Understand the key roles in RDM: Data Steward, Chief Data Officer, Data Protection Officer and other employees of the institution who can support the creation of DMP

Delivery format:

  • This lesson can be delivered in the form of a tutorial, webinar or self-paced self-study course

  • Required time: 2 lecture sessions (1.5 hrs each) and 1 practice session (approx 1.5 hrs)

Prerequisites:

  • Basic knowledge of computer software and applications

  • Understanding of organisational and/or research process and data used or produced

Lesson topics (Summary of tasks/actions):

A. Use cases for research data management and stewardship

  • Preserving the scientific record

B. Data management elements (organisational and individual)

  • Goals and motivation for managing your data

  • Data formats, metadata, related standards

  • Creating documentation and metadata, metadata for discovery

  • Using data portals and metadata registries

  • Tracking data usage, data provenance, linked data

  • Handling sensitive data

  • Backing up data, backup tools and services

C. Responsible data use (citations, copyright, data restrictions)

  • Data privacy and GDPR compliance

D. FAIR principles in research data management, supporting tools, maturity model and compliance

E. Data management plan (DMP)

F. Data stewardship and organisational data management

  • Responsibilities and competences

  • DMP management and data quality assurance

G. Open Research and Open Data (definition, standards, Open Data use and reuse, open government data)

  • Research data and open access

  • Repository and self-archiving services

  • Research Data Alliance (RDA) products and recommendations: persistent identifiers (PIDs), data types, data type registries, etc.

  • ORCID identifier for data and authors

  • Stakeholders and roles: engineer, librarian, researcher

  • Open Data services: ORCID.org, Altmetric Doughnut, Zenodo

Practice:

Hands-on practice including the following topics:

  1. Data management plan design, templates and tools

  2. Metadata and tools, metadata registries

  3. Selection of licences for Open Data and contents, e.g. Creative Commons and Open Database

Materials/Equipment

  1. Collection of DMP templates

  2. Example of metadata for research data and publications

  3. Collection of links to RDM tools, metadata registries

References

Take-home tasks

Organisational data management plan creation (using the provided template and/or online tools)

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