Why FDM?
Research data is the raw material of scientific work – managing it in a structured way makes a significant contribution to a resource-efficient, quality-oriented and transparent research process. Research data management (RDM) helps you to meet the increasing requirements set by research funding bodies or collaboration partners.
RDM is not a rigid framework, but rather a series of decisions that you can make individually for your research project and adapt to take account of subject-specific characteristics. Overall, a systematic approach to research data facilitates scientific work and increases the chances of securing funding.
What are research data?
Research projects can take many different forms. The data on which research is based can be just as diverse: survey and observational data, laboratory and measurement data, texts and audiovisual data, and simulations, to name but a few.
Regardless of the type, a structured, discipline-appropriate approach to research data contributes to sustainable and quality-oriented scientific practice.
Research data management in practice
The structured management of research data, with a focus on reusability, plays a key role in research projects. At various stages of your work, the Library’s Research Services team supports you with solution-oriented RDM services to ensure your research data is discoverable, accessible, interoperable and reusable – in short: FAIR. Please feel free to contact us at Forschungsdaten(at)
Planning how to manage research data at an early stage not only saves time and effort, but also paves the way for the visibility and dissemination of your research output. Furthermore, research funding bodies often set out requirements for research data management, and compliance with these is essential for a successful application. A Data Management Plan (DMP) is therefore a useful, and in some cases mandatory, document during the planning phase (and beyond). Guidance on creating a DMP (including links to templates and practical examples) is provided by HSRW DMP Guide, and a fillable template is available in HSRW DMP Outline.
The publication of research data under a free licence to complement scientific text publications is now common practice. This gives you the opportunity to reuse data from previous projects, e.g. to expand your own database or as comparative values. Preliminary work is accessible in numerous data repositories.
The secure storage of and collaborative work with research data are key priorities of data management during the data collection and analysis phase. Research data is a valuable asset. In addition to a fundamental strategy for preventing data loss (the 3-2-1 principle), factors such as data security, data volumes and data protection play a role in the selection of suitable storage systems. HSRW recommends that its researchers use the university’s own network drives and the free cloud service sciebo. For larger data volumes of up to 1 TB, we are happy to apply for sciebo project boxes on your behalf. The growing importance of the field of research data management is reflected in the development of high-performance nationwide infrastructures and support services. The services provided by the specialist consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) are available to researchers for processing and making research data available on a subject-specific basis. Please get in touch with us; we will support you in integrating external expertise and platforms.
Making research data available helps to raise the profile of your academic work. There are numerous repositories suitable for the long-term storage of your research data. You can often tailor the level of access – ranging from open access to restricted access and closed access – to suit the specific requirements or guidelines of your project. Data publications are increasingly recognised as independent publications in their own right and have been shown to provide an advantage when it comes to the citation of your research results. The OPUS publication server is available to you as an institutional service for the provision of research data; we would also be happy to advise you on alternatives.
