Since its inception, the EUDAT project has been working with various European research communities to identify the types of services that researchers commonly need for handling research data and then developing the most relevant of those services. EUDAT is currently offering a range of services through its CDI nodes, and is also in the process of developing further useful services. The services that end users see can be divided into four main areas as follows:

 

Why is data management important?

Managing research data is becoming increasingly important. Scientists are creating more and more data that are often difficult to be navigated and used. In addition, data are very fragile and susceptible to loss for a wide variety of reasons such as natural disaster, facilities infrastructure failure, storage failure, server hardware/ software failure, human error etc. Data management is critical to make sure your data are well-organised, understandable and reusable. Research data have also a direct impact on the quality of research: to make research more reliable, experiments need to be easily reproducible therefore data needs to be easily accessible and processed.

EUDAT’s services can support you to address the full lifecycle of research data as shown in the picture below:

 

Building your Data Management Plan

Research funder data policies are increasingly demanding researchers to create a research data management plan (DMP). A DMP describes the data management life cycle for all datasets to be collected, processed or generated by a research project. It must cover:

  • the handling of research data during & after the project.
  • what data will be collected, processed or generated.
  • what methodology & standards will be applied.
  • whether data will be shared /made open access & how.
  • how data will be curated & preserved.

The use of a Data Management Plan is required for projects participating in the Open Research Data Pilot. Other projects are invited to submit a DMP if it is relevant to their planned research.

EUDAT is supporting the H2020 projects programme by providing training material and webinars on how to write a Data Management Plan. Watch the webinar here.

 

Useful links: