1.1 The importance of research data management

Why should we care about the practices we employ when handling our research data? Why should we invest the time that handling research data requires? In this video, you will meet Kenneth Ruud, Professor of theoretical and computational chemistry and former Prorector of research at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Being an experienced researcher with a profound interest in open science, he reflects on the importance of research data for science and why transparency of research data management practices is key.

Lessons learned

• Transparency of research implies sharing information about the data and the methods used to collect or generate them, programs used to analyse them, and if and how other people can access them.
• As a reader of research articles, by having access to the data material and the code used in the analyses, you can reproduce research and see whether you reach the same conclusions as the original authors.
• There is currently a huge shift internationally in terms of openness with regard to research data.
• Science may become more effective with a culture of data sharing, as the same data can be used for different purposes.
• Research data should be in a format that can be used by different computer architectures. We don’t know what may be possible in the future. You should therefore think broadly about what constitutes your data and make them available.
• Investing in developing high quality datasets may improve your scientific standing and the impact of your PhD work.
• Institutions that have signed the DORA declaration are committed to evaluating all your contributions to science, not only your research articles.