Data Management

Why manage data?

The process of data management involves plans and procedures for the lifecycle of the data. Data management is good research practice as it:

• increases the value of research
• improves research visibility
• reduces the risk of data loss and corruption
• avoids data duplication
• enables research verifiability
• allows sharing and re-using of data with future researchers

UiO is responsible for all data used in research. However, it is ultimately the individual researcher that will need to abide by the rules and regulations. All projects funded by the Research Council of Norway are required to have data management plans.

Open Data

UiO’s policy follows the "open as standard" principle. However, there may be reasons for deciding not to make the data openly available. Privacy and copyright issues are typical reasons for not being able to make data openly available. This means that data should be as "open as possible, as closed as necessary".

There is no one definition of what "open" means. Also, keep in mind that "open" is not the same as "free". The two concepts overlap, but you may have free data that is not open and open data that is not free. The general recommendation is that data should be both open and freely available for reuse and redistribution. Then it is necessary to equip the data with a permissive license, such as the Creative Commons licenses (CC).

FAIR Principles

UiO wants to manage research data according to the FAIR principles, which state that data should be:

• Findable: Data should have rich metadata and persistent identifier.
• Accessible: Understanding authorization/authentication.
• Interoperable: Metadata should be shared, accessible in broadly applicable language for knowledge representation.
• Reusable: The data should be well defined to be replicated /combined in different settings.

The general idea is that Open Data needs to be FAIR. After all, if you cannot find and access the data, they are not open. However, FAIR data does not necessarily need to be open. For example, a lot of data in the NSD database is not publicly available. However, the data follows the FAIR principles, so they are findable, and they can be accessed if one applies to use them. So the data's FAIRness secures that the data may be reusable even if they are not published openly.

Getting Started with Data Management

Starting the process of data management can be daunting. It is recommended to begin early in project development. Important components are:

1. Create a Data Management Plan (DMP)
2. Handle the ethical/legal aspects
   1. Ethics
   2. Privacy
   3. Copyright
3. Organize your files:
   1. File naming
   2. RITMO Felles Folder Structure (Restricted to employees only)
   3. Metadata
4. Store the data
   1. UiO's Color Classification Guide
   2. Data storage Guide
5. Archive the data