SND has just released new data management pages for researchers. This material is intended to provide an overview of data management in research projects, and to be a source of support throughout the research process, from planning to concluding a project.
The development of the new data management pages has been a long time in the making, and is the result of an ambitious initiative by an internal SND group, with support from several other staff. The pages are divided into five sections: Plan, Organise, Document, Work with Data, and Prepare and Share. The intention is that the content will be a resource that can be used by researchers throughout the research process. SND training coordinator Stefan Ekman is one of the staff who has been involved in developing the content to these pages.
—The new SND data management pages provide an overview of data management in research projects. They briefly address various perspectives on how to manage research data, and give an idea of what you need to think about, depending on where you are in a project and what type of data you’re working with. Our ambition is that you should be able to find the information you need without having to sift through huge volumes of text, Stefan explains.
Accessible texts for researchers with different levels of experience
The new web pages are aimed at researchers and research project staff. A guiding principle in creating this content has been to find a level which may appeal to researchers in various stages of their careers.
—It shouldn’t matter whether you’re a doctoral student, postdoc, or senior researcher; we’ve tried to write these pages so that you don’t need to have a lot of background knowledge or experience.
Stefan Ekman says that these new pages come from a need to develop information for the SND website that is created specifically for researchers. As SND publishes more training material and information, it becomes all the more important to separate and clarify the difference between resources for researchers, and resources for the research data support units (DAU).
—We believe that these two groups need different entryways as well as different types of information. The BAS Online web training and the so-called DAU Handbook, for example, are aimed at local research data support functions. Therefore we thought that it was important to develop material that was primarily designated for researchers.
Plans for further developments
The new data management pages can be regarded as a first version of a resource that will grow over time. There are already plans to develop the pages further in order to add information that wasn’t covered in this version, but what that would be has not yet been decided.
—On our Wish List is an integration with and revision of our legal information. We would also like to offer more audio-visual material and more illustrations, and we will create a version of the text which you can reference to more easily.
The SND data management pages are currently available only in Swedish, but translation work has begun and an English version is scheduled for publication during summer 2020.