Research Data Consulting


For successful research data management, many aspects need to be taken into account, which may require different measures depending on the use case to ensure the accessibility of the digital research data. Keeping track of these aspects is a challenge for every project right from the very beginning and requires a customised research data management. Our team at FID move would therefore like to offer you an individual consulting service tailored to mobility and transport research in the following topics of research data management:

 

Data Management Plan

Even before the project begins a data management plan helps you to plan your administration of your research data. During your project a data management plan assists you to record your data in a structured form. This not only reduces the risk of data loss, but also ensures the accessibility of your research data by publishing it under a suitable licence. At the same time, thereby, increasing your citation rate. Furthermore, a well-developed data management plan makes it easier for you to write necessary reports during and after the project period. Last but not least, as many funding bodies already require a data management plan for successful approval the creation of such a plan opens up new funding opportunities for you. Usually the required human resources and technical resources can even be claimed in these third-party funding applications. Guidance on how to create a data management plan can be found here.

Tools

A variety of different tools are available for your successful research data management. These can support you in the creation and the maintenance of your data management plan or in the version management of your developed scientific software or in the preparation and publication of your research data.

Metadata

For the best use, your research data should be provided with informative metadata that describes the type and content of your research data as precisely as possible. This not only makes it easier for you to work with your research data, but is also a basic requirement for later publication. So that it can be easily searched and found at any time.  In order to facilitate the automated assignment of data publications to institutions and authors, e.g. with DataCite Commons, the metadata should contain persistent identifiers (PIDs, e.g. ORCIDs for authors, DOIs for publications, and RORs for institutions.  Last but not least, a metadata standard should be carefully chosen that is best suited to your research data.  An overview of metadata standards can be found in the RDA Metadata Standards Catalog.

Licences

To ensure long-term and easy re-use of your research data, it is indispensable to select a suitable use licence. Therefore, the first step is to clarify the copyrights and the rights of use of your research data and to categorise them according to their data type. Then you can select the best use licence depending on the use case and type of data. There can be many different types of licences for your purpose, e.g.  the Creative Common Licenses. Provided with a licence you can publish your research data, for example, in a repository. Now the scientific community can have access to your data.

Repositories

In order to make your research data accessible and reusable to third parties in the long term, you should publish them in a repository. There, with the help of extensive search functions and often also by assigning persistent identifiers (PID), your research data with metadata can be easily found and can be accessed and re-used by other researchers. Depending on the focus of your research, scope and archiving approach, different (subject-specific) repositories are available, e.g. the FID-move Repository, which is specialised in publishing mobility and transport research data.

 

Contact

If you have any questions about research data and research data management, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us by email at forschungsdaten@fid-move.de or by phone at +49 511 762-14140.