Guidelines and Policies
Rules for managing research data
E. Böker / CC BY 4.0
RDM guidelines and policies: what are they good for?
Research data policies are guidelines which apply to all members of an institution (e.g. a university) and govern how research data are to be managed. These policies are not just employed at academic institutions. Many funding organisations have also implemented similar guidelines which set the standards for research data management.
In Germany, there are almost no RDM policies that provide detailed stipulations. Most existing policies are basic self-commitments usually including the principles of open access, the FAIR principles or the rules of good scientific practice. However, it can be positively noted that the number of universities that enshrine these principles in their own guidelines is steadily growing.
In addition, research data policies were stipulated in the funding programmes of the DFG and the EU. For example, in the pilot project for open research data of the Horizon 2020 programme, corresponding policies were tested at the end of the project, in which participation made it obligatory to use data management plans and to pass on research data [1].
Discipline-specific Policies
Not only academic institutions and funders employ research data policies. They also exist for specific academic disciplines and interdisciplinary organisations. The following provides and overview of developments in this area as well as the most important discipline-specific, interdisciplinary and journal policies.
In the geo, life and social sciences there is an especially varied plethora of policies, due to their frequent dealing with sensitive and/or personal data. Such discipline-specific guidelines are necessary since reseach data are heterogenous and shaped by the respective academic cultures they stem from. In the social sciences, for example, many social science data archives have formed a consortium represented by their umbrella organisation named "Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA)"[2].
In the life sciences, the „Good clinical practice“ and „Good laboratory practice“ guidelines set the standard for handling research data. Both policies have been formalised on the OECD level and are legally enshrined in the German Medicines Law and Chemicals Act, respectively[3].
Other discipline-specific policies
- 1996: „Bermuda Principles“ by the Human Genome Project in cooperation with funding institutions
- Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - three Policys by the collaborating partners regarding the accessibility of the LHC data: ATLAS, LHCb and DocDB
Journal Policies
Journal data policies are of special importance. Access to data which publications are based on is necessary for quality control within the framework of peer review. Moreover, many journals and publishers have started to foster open access to scientific data. Depending on the respective discipline, these journal policies can vary in their focus and scope. Some life science journals have already established open access as their standard (for example the journal Cell). Others promote re-use of the data (e.g. Plos One).
Journal | What has to be made available? |
|---|---|
Nature[4] (journal collection) | materials, data and affiliated publication protocols |
American Geophysical Union[5] | „Policy on Referencing Data in and Archiving Data for AGU Publications“, concrete requirements for data archives and citations for research data |
clearly documented analysis data, in case of empirical studies and simulations; reserach software and calculations have to be made available for reviewers upon request | |
Plos One[7] | data and materials underlying any publication |
Cell[8] | materials and protocolls stemming from published experiments, e.g. nucleotide and protein sequences in suitable data banks (Worldwide Protein Data Bank), access via „accession number“ |
Research Data Policies - an Overview
References
- ↑ Guidelines on FAIR Data Management in Horizon 2020 , Version 3.0 (26. Juli 2016).
- ↑ CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives), 2017: Statutes for CESSDA.
- ↑ See AMG, GCP-V und ChemG, §19 a-d.
- ↑ See Special issue on Data Sharing (Nature, 2009) and Guide to Publication Policies of the Nature Journals (2009).
- ↑ See AGU, Publications Data Policy (1996).
- ↑ See AER, Data Availability Policy (2016).
- ↑ See PloS ONE, Material and Software Sharing.
- ↑ See Cell, Information for Authors (2011).