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Target audience and mission
This guide is written for social science researchers who are in an early stage of practising research data management. With this guide, CESSDA wants to contribute to professionalism in data management and increase the value of research data.
This video is also available on Zenodo. Please cite it as: CESSDA Training Team. (2020). What is the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide & how can it help you?. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4569323
Overview
If you follow the guide, you will travel through the research data lifecycle from planning, organising, documenting, processing, storing and protecting your data to sharing and publishing them. Taking the whole roundtrip will take you approximately 15 hours, however you can also hop on and off at any time.
During your travels, you will come across the following recurring topics represented by images:
Seven chapters
The following seven chapters are currently available.
In this introductory tour, you will become aware of what data management and a data management plan (DMP) are and why they are important. General concepts such as social science data and FAIR data will be explained. Based on our recommendations and good practice examples, you will be able to start writing your DMP.
If you are looking for good practices in designing an appropriate data file structure, naming, documenting and organising your data files within suitable folder structures, this chapter is for you.
You will get acquainted with the topics of data entry and coding as the first steps of proper data management. To maintain the integrity of your data we will guide you in choosing the appropriate file format. You will also find out about version and edition management.
To be able to plan a storage and backup strategy, you will learn about different storage and backup solutions and their advantages and disadvantages. Also, measures to protect your data from unauthorised access with strong passwords and encryption will be explained.
This chapter highlights your legal and ethical obligations and shows how a combination of gaining consent, anonymising data, gaining clarity over who owns the copyright to your data and controlling access can enable the ethical and legal sharing of data.
When you arrive at this chapter you will have learnt to differentiate between currently available data publication services. You will also find a number of stepping stones on how to promote your data.
How can you discover and reuse existing or previously collected datasets?
Get started
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Project details
The Data Management Expert Guide has been created for CESSDA ERIC by a number of its service providers' experts at: ADP, AUSSDA, CSDA, DANS, FORS, FSD, GESIS, NSD (Sikt), SND, So.Da.Net and UKDS and is illustrated and edited by Verbeeldingskr8. The authors are mentioned by their names in the overview of the relevant chapter(s). DANS led the creation of this expert guide.
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Having a background in learning and knowledge sharing, it was a great pleasure to co-ordinate the creation of this Data Management Expert Guide.