If you missed our recent workshop on FAIR Data Management, here is the link to the pre-recorded webinar with more information on how to make your research data set compliant with the FAIR principles. You can also read about some topics discussed during our workshop September 29, 2023.
In the webinar you will find detailed information on research data management and making your data compliant with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, whereas also the broader context of EOSC and the role of Research Infrastructures is covered.
This webinar was intended as a preparation for the online workshop that was held offering September 29, 2023, but can also very well be used separately if you want to know more about FAIR data and how to work with them.
The workshop itself was opened by trainer Roxanne Wyns, defining “data sharing” as follows: “Datasharing is making your data available to other researchers, ideally done in a dedicated repository.” And this is exactly what was practiced during the workshop, making use of the Zenodo and EUDAT repositories, to which Michiel De Clerck gave a detailed instruction.
Given the number of questions posed to the trainers after practicing with the two repositories, it appeared that participants did understand the importance of storing data in trustworthy repositories and of sharing data. Questions asked related to rights and licenses, for example: Does my country allow me to share all research data openly? Trainers gave several feedback in this respect, like: What can be shared depends slightly from country to country. If you are not sure if you have to rights to share the data, then just sharing the meta data could be an option. When working with data from social media, one can limit him/herself to data on specific posts, made on specific days by specific persons, and only store that data as closed data.
From the interactive part of the workshop it became clear that data publication is not always easy, in fact preparing research data for publication can be rather challenging. Therefore, it can take a while before data can be published, and it is quite normal that all kind of questions arise in this respect, which was also the case during the workshop. General advices were given by our trainers, like: If you are not sure about data storage on your laptop, you can put it in a cloud environment or in a safe rspository like Zenodo under closed access. Zenodo is compliant to GDPR regulations, and also allows uploading updated datasets that come about after a while.
Working with data from newspapers has its own challenges because it remains copyrighted material even when it is stored in archives. For example, copyright has to be checked with the specific newspaper, not with the archive that holds the newspaper. A possibility here is to store the data coming from newspapers in a repository with closed access, but not with open access.
Links to articles are sources that can be published, because a link is public information. The copyright however, is represented on the material that is accessed via the link.
Increasingly, data from social media is being used in doing research today. For X (previously known as Twitter) for example, our trainers explained that one is allowed to share the ID’s of social media posts, so the link to a post itself when it is from a public account, although not the text body itself. When sharing social media data, researchers need to take into account the terms and conditions of the social media platform, privacy concerns related to the personal data of users as well as regulations such as GDPR.
RESILIENCE is gladly willing to further support researchers in working with the FAIR principles. If you have any questions related to that, feel free to contact us via email.