Why do Data Management ?¶

Disaster recovery¶

Disk Drives Break¶

DataCent collection of disk drive failure sounds

Buildings burn down¶

Southampton University Mountbatten Building Fire

Laptops Break / Get Broken¶

Shot laptop

Data Reuse¶

Do you reuse other people's data ? Can they reuse your's ?

Researcher Development Framework¶

SCONUL Information Literacy 7 Pillars Diagrams

Licensing¶

Whose data is it anyway ?

Research policies at QMUL Academic Registry and Council Secretariat

Creative Commons: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Data CC Licenses / CC0

Science Commons: http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/

Restrictions based on data ownership

Restrictions based on data parentage - use of e.g. CC-SA data

Where possible, CC0 with a request for citations is preferred.

Practical Steps Towards Data Management¶

File formats - use open formats where possible to future-proof files.

File naming - give files meaningful names.

Metadata - include a plain-text README file describing the contents of the files.

License - include a plain-text LICENSE file describing the license for the dataset.

Check that a copy of your data will be backed up - e.g. check that the network drive you store your data on is actually backed up.

Repositories¶

The appropriate repository will partly depend upon the data.

It could be... C4DM RDR, Dryad, Flick, Archiv.Org...

However, if you want data to be reused in a citable manner remember to package the license and the required citation with the data. It means that however the data reaches the final user the only excuse for not being able to cite the data is that someone has bothered to remove the info...

Open Source Learning Tools¶

Xerte