Currently institutions, consortia and national/international funders have their own data management policy/protocol and provide templates for data management planning. The multiple choices can confuse researchers and are tedious if followed repetitively. In addition, researchers cannot be expected to have all the necessary knowledge for filling in data management plan templates; some of the information in the templates is repository or institution level and some yet unknown to young researchers/PhD students starting their studies. Therefore, there is a need for a protocol to bring order to data management specifications from various institutes, consortia and funding organizations. If researchers comply with such a common domain protocol irrespective of a data management plan template they have to write, it will lower their burden for managing their data. For institutes, consortia and funding organizations, embracing domain-specific policies and practices for curating research data will help them to provide normative and strategic data curation to its researchers. For example, if researcher follow protocol of depositing their data in a certified repository, they do not have to worry about many of the FAIR principles of data, e.g., about persistent identifier, metadata vocabulary etc.. Domain specific attributes can be taken into account in the protocol. Unlike the general DMP templates we provide information on the standards used in domains for data collection, licenses specific to humanities. In addition, the protocol can take into account the extent of knowledge necessary for researchers to fill in the data management plan and the responsibility to provide the information to the funders.
The proposed protocol:
Article 1 Training — Researchers follow a course on data management planning for their research data.
Article 2 Planning- Data management plan
Researchers use template from their institutes, consortia, funding organization. Instead of a new policy, we propose specific information which can be used by researchers to fill in templates on domain level. The focus is on not to let researchers search what they need but to provide them options to choose from.
ii Method of data collection — Researchers describe standards and methodology used to collect the data for their research
iii Data types — Researchers describe what type of data are collected. In some research domains, the border between what counts as a data and what does not count as data is debated. Therefore, we give here the data types1,2 in article accessibility A1 common in domains. (Data types from references will be written.)
iv Privacy — Researchers describe privacy issues with the data collected. In principle data are anonymized in accordance with ethical guidelines and privacy regulations (given in reference).
v Intellectual property rights/Data ownership — Researchers should know that research data will be owned by the funders, and/or by the universities. employing them. The intellectual property rights belong to researchers who conduct and publish the research. Raw data deals with information, and therefore not protected by intellectual rights of ownership (which protects the way information is presented, but not the information itself)3.
vi Codes of conduct/Ethical aspects –Researchers describe if there are any ethical aspect of data collection from the list of codes of conduct.
vii Depositing raw data- Researchers describe what strategies they follow to save their data during research, for example, in cloud, or on computer (Examples of intermittent data repositories are provided).
Article 3 Analysis — Researchers describe methods used for data analysis including software.
Researchers are provided with the list of softwares, which are considered sustainable to process the data.
Article 4 Long term preservation — If researcher submit their data after the completion of their research in a basic level certified repository, they oblige by FAIR requirements:
i Findability: F1(Persistent Identifier), F2(Rich metadata), F3(metadata identifier), F4(indexed in references: sources where domain data can be found)
(example metadata standards for humanities: DDI, MIDAS, OAI-ORE, QuDEx, SDMX)
ii Accessibility: A1(standard communication protocol for domain specific research), A1.1(open), A1.2(AAI), A2(metadata when no data is available)
iii Interoperability: I1(formal language), I2(researchers choose from vocabularies used in domain research), I3(references)
Article 5 Reusability /Repeatability — (Summary of F, A & I): researchers decide on R1(attributes), R1.1(list of licenses to choose from, specific to humanities), R1.2(provenance), R1.3(list of domain standards)
Support resources/ References
- The Netherlands Code of Conduct for Scientific Practice
- Code of Conduct for the Use of Personal Data in Academic Research
- Notitie Wetenschappelijke Integriteit — KNAW, NWO en VSNU 2001
- Dutch privacy regulations (“Wet bescherming persoonsgegevens”)
- Statement datamanagement TiU: Beschikbaarheid en toegankelijkheid van TiU — onderzoeksdata)
- Framework document for discipline dependent research data management, 31 March 2017 Science Europe Working group on Research data management protocols
- Richtlijn archivering wetenschappelijk onderzoek voor Nederlandse faculteiten Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen Versie 2, juli 2017
- Data management policy for the Tilburg School of Humanities
- Research data management protocol FGw UvA
- PARTHENOS research data management template
- Horizon2020 DMP template
- Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements
- https://www.rd-alliance.org/ig-domain-repositories-rda-9th-plenary-meeting
- http://www.scienceeurope.org/ en dan: http://www.scienceeurope.org/policy/working-groups/research-data/
- https://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk/
- Catherine Anne Woeber: Towards best practice in research data management in the humanities
1 Richtlijn archivering wetenschappelijk onderzoek voor Nederlandse faculteiten Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen Versie 2, juli 2017
2 Research data management protocol FGw UvA
3 Report by the Center for Intellectual property law (CIER)