In recent years, the FAIR principles have become the standard for research data and are now at the core of policies from universities, funders and publishers: European Commission, as well as other sponsors, requires funding beneficiaries to make the resulting research findings available for open access.
Therefore, managing at its best your research data is core of the research process, from the organization to the dissemination of results: for this reason, FAIR data principles and transparent research data management skills are more and more significant. Even though Data Management Plans are increasingly required by institutions and funding agencies (especially the EU commission) they are not merely an administrative task. Writing your DMP as early as possible is a key step for managing your data as it allows to better organize your research project since from its beginning and ensures that you are aware of different responsibilities and rights associated to publishing research data in open access modalities. Furthermore, publishing a completed DMP can enhance the discovery, access, dissemination and reuse of your research data. Thus, a DMP can be a crucial tool to develop research data management skills for each step of the research data lifecycle, from collection to dissemination. Indeed, at the final steps of the research data lifecycle, depositing and sharing research data on trustworthy digital repositories is becoming more and more important not only to meet the funders and journals’ requirements, but also to increase the impact of your research outputs, enhancing aspects such as transparency, interoperability and reusability.
Importantly, think about these issues:
- Openness and transparency are closely linked to the scientific method: but have you ever wondered how open can and should research be?
- Have you ever lost access to your research data and wondered how to prevent it in the future?
- Are the funders of your research project or of your grant demanding that you produce a detailed Data Management Plan and that you publish your research data on an open access repository?
- Are you unsure about how to anonymize research data?
- Do you want to improve your ability to manage sensitive research data?
- Have you recently submitted an article and been asked to indicate a DOI for your research data?
- Are you having trouble understanding how open access applies to research data, and not just to publications?
- Have you ever read an interesting publication wondering if you could have access to the original data because it might be useful for your work?
- What happens if someone publishes or steals your results? Are you able to prove when the data was generated and that you did it?
Find the answers to these existential questions, learn how to efficiently manage your research data according to the FAIR principles by writing the perfect DMP, and boost your ability of disseminating your research results by sharing your research data on UNIMI’s certified FAIR data repository Dataverse by enrolling in our online training courses:
For any doubts or queries on the trainings, you can contact us at rdm@unimi.it