Data Management, Retention, and Sharing
About
Are you writing a grant proposal for a research project or in the process of planning a new research project? Are you interested in disseminating your research data to other scholars and the public online as well as preserving their long-term integrity and preserving access to them? Are you publishing an article or monograph with a publisher that requires the retention, citation, and sharing of the data underlying the publication? Are you looking for a place to deposit your data in order to make it discoverable by other researchers and the public and comply with funder retention requirements?
Contact Andrew Creamer (andrew_creamer@brown.edu) for help with your data management, retention, and sharing needs.
An increasing number of federal and private research sponsors require the creation of data management plans (DMPs) and Data Sharing Plans. These plans outline how a researcher or research team will plan for the documentation, management, and retention of the digital research products (data, metadata, and code) that they create or collect throughout their projects. They also outline how these research products will be disseminated and made available to the public and to other researchers.
Important DMP Elements:
- Open and preservation-friendly formats for collecting, storing, and sharing data
- Community standards used to describe data necessary for discovery and reuse
- Plans for versioning, storing, and backing up digital files
- Plans for securing data containing identifiers or content posing a risk to privacy and confidentiality
- The plans for long-term retention and access to digital research products
- Assigned terms of use for re-distribution and production of derivatives
Sharing, Publishing and Citing Research Data:
- Clarifying rights and ownership and obtaining any necessary permissions
- Outline the terms of use
- Choose the appropriate format and repository for long-term preservation for long-term access;
- Use international standards for describing and structuring these works and collections in order to make them discoverable and accessible by intended users.
Supported Applications
- Brown Digital Repository The Brown Digital Repository (BDR) is Brown Library’s archive for preserving and platform for disseminating individual or collections of digital research products (data sets, metadata, and code) online. Brown faculty and students can use the BDR to make their data available to the public or to the Brown community. Deposited data sets are assigned their own catalog record with customized information describing the object and a unique URL. Users can request a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that they and others can use to cite their data and their location in a publication. In addition to making your work more discoverable, the BDR is an ideal long-term storage option because of its mission to preserve the integrity and access to deposited files. The BDR also provides an API for making stored content and structured data available through a website.
- DMPTool The DMPTool is an online tool for writing data management plans for sponsored research. Go to DMPTool.org and select Brown University from the institution drop down. Log in using your Brown University username and password. Select the funder associated with your grant proposal. The DMPTool will guide you through the writing of a plan by using a template based on that funder’s specific requirements. You can create an account and save and store your plans on the site or download and save the files to your own computer. Bring your drafted plan into CDS for review!
- LabArchives@Brown Electronic Lab Notebook LabArchives@Brown is an online electronic lab notebook (ELN). Go to https://library.brown.edu/info/labarchives and log in using your Brown username and password. You can then create as many personal or shared research notebooks as you want. An ELN allows you to create folders, subfolders, and pages to document your research. You can upload any file type to LabArchives@Brown. You can add tags to files, pages, and folders to help with searching across notebooks, and you can create templates for standardizing the description of data. You can share any page or folder with specific collaborators or and add collaborator roles to enable or restrict their access privileges to read-only or read&write.
- Brown Open Science Framework Brown OSF is an online project management and dissemination tool aimed at making research more open and transparent. Go to https://osf.io/institutions/brown/ and log in with your Brown University username and password. Using the OSF platform you can create and document a project from its beginning to its end and associate it with Brown. Each addition and edit is documented with a timestamp that records the name of the person making the contribution or edit, what type of contribution and change was made, and when it was made. You have the option to add specific collaborators to your project. You can also choose to make your project private or public. You can even enable public commenting or contributions to a project. Start a project and add as many components as you like. OSF allows you to store files on OSF or link out to files that you have stored in other tools such as GitHub, DropBox and Google Drive, among others.
Projects
Contact
For inquires regarding textual and quantitative analysis, please contact cds_info@brown.edu.
Andrew Creamer
Scientific Data Management