Typically, funders will require you to:
- Create a Data Management Plan.
- Store your data safely and securely.
- Develop appropriate metadata which describes what your data is.
- Upload your datasets to a repository and make it open and discoverable where possible.
- Preserve and curate your data for a defined retention period, typically 5-10 years
*Please check your funders policy on Research Data to ensure you are complying with their requirements.
- Metadata is ’data about data’. It is information that enables users to find a dataset. This is the cornerstone of effective ‘open data’. All researchers are responsible for providing and publishing sufficient metadata and explanatory notes about their research data to ensure it is discoverable, understandable and re-useable.
- Providing detailed and meaningful dataset titles, descriptions, keywords and other information enables data centres to create rich resource-discovery metadata for archived data collections that are searchable by all users.
- When creating a metadata record, researchers are encouraged to include persistent identifiers such as DOIs for the published research output(s) which have utilised the research data as an evidence base.
- Any data that serves as evidence for your claims and results should be archived.
- Information required to validate or reproduce results.
- Not all data can be disclosed and freely shared, e.g. patient data and health records must be anonymized. DMP's must also state any constraints regarding confidentiality or copyright for example.
- Data should normally be published by publication date at the latest.
- The University provides an Institutional Research Data Repository as part of the Pure system.
- There are a wide range of data repositories which are commonly used to publish and store research data. It is important to note that it is University policy that all research data should be recorded or catalogued in the Pure system, regardless of whether the actual datasets are stored in the University’s data repository or elsewhere.
- All published datasets in the Pure system can be accessed through the University's Research Portal.
- The University provides an McClay Research Data Storage (RDS) Service, available to Queen's research projects. This allows you to save data in a dedicated data centre for research, based on-campus, via FTP (a standard method for transferring files). The facility can accommodate large volumes of data and support HPC activities, if required.
- Physical security: Physically the data is stored in secure server rooms. Access is restricted to a specific set of individuals and video surveillance is in operation.
- Access to the facility is provided following request directly to HPC. Email here to make an RDS request.
- Accessing the service off campus: The active space may be accessed remotely using the Kelvin VPN service. All users must have an account in the University’s Active Directory service.
- Researchers are responsible for planning for the ongoing maintenance (at the University or using third-party services) of their data in the event of departure or retirement from the University.
- You must remove any working data from University systems that belongs to you. On leaving Queen’s, it is your responsibility to ensure that this data is stored and managed correctly, that the privacy and confidentiality of the data is kept intact, and that the data is deposited or disposed of appropriately at the end of the retention period.
- Copies of completed data that you have deposited in the University’s institutional data repository will remain in the care of the University. If your data were deposited for Open Access display, it will continue to be found and cited using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned to the collection at the time of publishing.