Research Data Management
All research is based on data – data that you collected yourself through surveys, interviews or experiments, data that you aggregated from public registers, data that were provided to you by a commercial data service, or data that were published in journals and trusted repositories.
But how are you handling these core assets of your research? How do you make sure that you are always accessing the latest version of a given data set? How do you make sure that you regularly back up your data? And how do you share your data with your collaborators at CBS, at other Danish universities and abroad?
Research data management comprises all practices that ensure that your research data are well organised, documented, backed up, and securely stored throughout their entire lifecycle.
Research Data Lifecycle (by DTU AIS Bibliometrics and Data Management - licensed under CC0 1.0)
CBS' Research Data Management Policy
From September through December 2016 a task force, appointed by the Dean of Research, worked on a draft for a RDM policy that was approved by Senior Management in June 2017. The task force was chaired by Helle Zinner Henriksen (DIGI) and consisted of four researchers, appointed by CBS’ PhD-schools, and three administrative staff.
The policy was drafted on the background of national and international reference policies as well as the RDM requirements of relevant national and international research funders. It is designed with a twofold objective:
- to give researchers guidance on the principles of good research data management and
- to ensure compliance with all relevant legal and political requirements, without burdening the researchers with more rules and regulations than strictly necessary.
Furthermore, the task force decided that the policy should clearly address the issue of responsibility for the different elements of the policy. Therefore, the policy explicitly states whether a specific issue is supposed to be handled
- by the individual researcher herself/himself,
- by CBS as an institution or
- by a specific administrative unit at CBS (typically CBS RDM Support, CBS IT, CBS Legal or CBS RSO/External Funding).
CBS RDM Steering Committee
The CBS RDM Steering committee consists of representatives from all departments and from the relevant administrative units (CBS RDM Support, CBS IT and CBS Legal). It is currently chaired by Carsten Sørensen, professor at FI and director of the DRDS project.
The committee's key objective is “to promote and ensure the quality of research data management at CBS” (Terms of reference for the CBS RDM Steering Committee). It follows closely the implementation of the RDM policy.