Prior to Starting Data Collection / Before Starting Your Project
- Ethics
- Data Management Plans
- Software Management Plans
- Privacy / sensitive data
- Data preservation & repositories
- Interoperable file formats
- Data documentation
Ethics
Data Management Plans
Software Management Plans
Privacy / sensitive data
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is Europe’s data privacy and security law. The GDPR applies when personally identifiable data (PII) are processed of EU/EER citizens, or in the EU/EER.
As members of a European research institution, faculty researchers must comply with the GDPR, even if their participants are not EU citizens or residents.
For further information, please click here.
Data preservation & repositories
Researchers are encouraged to preserve their datasets in repositories that are trusted, relevant for their communities and that fulfill the legal requirements in case they apply. In case of doubt, national repositories and certified repositories should be preferred (e.g., CoreTrustSeal certification).
The repository should ideally ensure that (FAIR principles A1, A2):
- the access conditions of the data are clearly displayed;
- if an embargo needs to be applied, only the description of the dataset is published;
- standardized exchange protocols are used so that metadata are publicly accessible an harvestable by machines;
- metadata are accessible eve when the data re no longer available.
In the future, we aim at making a documented repository list covering the field-specific solutions currently used within the faculty to facilitate the researchers’ work – in the meantime, please contact your data steward for advice.
Interoperable file formats
Not all file formats are equally sustainable. We recommend to prefer data formats that offer the most interoperability: that are durable and that are uncompressed or lossless (FAIR principles I1).
Regarding durability two different choices can be made, either open and non-proprietary formats or ubiquitous proprietary formats. The ubiquitous proprietary formats are indeed as likely to perdure as the open and non-proprietary ones if they are community standard.
Examples of such interoperable data formats include, but are not limited to:
Documented text: PDF, ODT
Text files: TXT, RTF, XML
Tabular data: CSV, TAB, ODS
Image data: TIFF, JPEG2000 (Warning: JPEG is different than JPEG2000 – JPEG is a lossy format)
Audio data: FLAC, WAV
Video data (compressed but lossless): MPEG-4 ASP, OGG, MPEG-2, AV1, VP9
Data documentation
Metadata are the data that describe your data; it contains all the information necessary to understand and interpret the data underlying your research. There are multiple metadata standards, as well as discipline-specific standards that create uniform documentation across fields. An overview of different metadata standards can be found here.
Metadata can be (automatically) integrated in the data files, or can be added in a separate document such as a README file.