Scroll down for more background information
- The data life cycle
- Protecting personal data and other legal issues
- Put FAIR principles into practice
- Guidance for the key items
- Guidance from other organisations
Here one finds background information, and links to tools and services to support researchers at creating and reusing FAIR data. They may help researchers to meet ZonMw’s requirements for data management.
The information is part of ZonMw’s new approach for research data management and stewardship (RDM): to make RDM of added value for researchers, to tailor RDM requirements according to the specific research topics and disciplines in research programmes, and to stimulate the use of standards to improve the interoperability of research data.
The information on this webpage is only a starting point. Consult a data steward at your research institute to learn about the local facilities, and to discuss the options for creating reusable data in your project.
To picture the actions that are needed for planning and executing RDM, it helps to take the data life cycle in mind. The scheme is part of a DTL presentation (on Zenoodo website) that shows the transition from one research phase to another. The transition implies that also one’s data go from one state to the next (e.g., raw data, curated data). When planning RDM, you actually (1) describe what should happen with data within a phase, and (2) describe what is needed for a transition from one phase to the other.
Researchers who reuse data, or generate new data that are reusable, need to consider a number of ethical, legal, social implications (ELSI). Health researchers are particularly concerned with the protection of personal data.
The reusability of FAIR data strongly depends upon the way researchers deal with issues like privacy, intellectual property, research code of conduct and sustainability. Consider for example the informed consent of a patient, stating whether it is allowed to reuse a dataset in future research.
Therefore, researchers need to take measures for protecting their data against misuse, set conditions for data sharing while protecting your intellectual property, ensure sustainable archiving after their project, and sufficient budget for that, preserve the software for reusing their data, etc.
The following sections provide background information, and links to services and experts.
The FAIR principles (and their 15 subprinciples) provide guidelines for creating digital resources such as datasets, code, workflows, and research objects, in a way that makes them Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).
Researchers need to provide information about the outcome of their efforts on RDM. ZonMw measures the outcome through a number of key items (‘kerngegevens’). The key items relate to several aspects of the FAIR principles.
Here you can read more about the key items, and a short guidance to comply with them