Why manage data

Revision as of 21:50, 27 July 2021 by P.petrelli (talk | contribs)


Why should I manage my data output?

In your own interest:

  • making sure your data is safe
  • making sure you produce good quality data
  • sharing your data increases your chances of being cited. Your research has more impact in your field and potentially in other research areas too
  • data and software you produce is starting to count more when you apply for grants or a new job, funding agencies are looking for ways to include it in their metrics
  • avoid wasting time down the track to fix errors and collect last minute information when you need to publish your results
  • making it easier for other researchers to collaborate with you and for technical staff to help you
  • over time improving your knowledge of data management itself will make it easier to comply with new requirements from funding agencies and universities


In the CLEX interest:

Keeping track of what data is being produced helps researchers to share data and procedures effectively within the Centre. The main reason to unite climate researchers in a Centre of Excellence is to promote collaboration across institutions.

It helps the CMS team to keep track of which datasets and models are worth maintaining, which tasks should be prioritised. Knowing what you're working on helps us planning and managing our limited time and resources in a more efficient way.

Your data output is an asset for your own institution and for the Centre, it helps to show we are doing a good job as much as journal publications do. In particular the centre of excellence funding agreement states that researcher should:

take reasonable care of, and safely store, any data 

make arrangements acceptable to the ARC for lodgement with an appropriate archive in Australia of data

The ARC strongly encourages the depositing of data arising from ARC Centres of Excellence in an appropriate publicly accessible discipline and/or institutional repository. 

DMPs and sharing data are becoming a requirement for funding agencies and journal publishers:

  • The ARC Open Access policy that now applies only to publications will soon be extended to data output. While a DMP is not compulsory yet, it will add weight to your application. And from this year also the use of a researcher ID is encouraged, a researcher ID offers a single link to all your papers, cv, research projects and data and software output.

    Recently journal editors have updated their data policy and now require that data relating to the submitted paper should be made available by the authors. AGU, Nature, PLOS are examples of publishers that are already requesting the data to be published. We are helping our staff and students by creating a record for their data on the ANDS Research Data Australia repository, and serving their data as part of a CLEx collection on the NCI web data services. To do this we need information which is already collected in a DMP, so having a DMP will help you to be ready for this most important part of your research project.
    From the ARC funding rules:
A11.5.2 Researchers and institutions have an obligation to care for and maintain research data in accordance with the NHMRC/ARC/UA Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007). The ARC considers data management planning an important part of the responsible conduct of research and strongly encourages the depositing of data arising from a Project in an appropriate publically accessible subject and/or institutional repository.
A11.5.3 The ARC encourages all researchers applying for funding to have an ORCID identifier.

ARC Research Data Management

  • A DMP helps satisfy NCI that the allocated cpu time and/or storage are being efficiently used, which can help future allocation requests. The same is true also if you need to use some of the ARDC (Australian Resource Data Common) resources as cloud computing of storage.
  • most Australian universities are introducing compulsory data management plans.

Common concerns

My data could be misused or misinterpreted
provide clear information
My data is too complicated
document and organise it properly
My data is not very interesting!
you never know how your data can be re-used and for whom will be interesting
I want to use my data and write a paper
use an embargo and start by publishing the data you are not using
I’m not sure if I own the data
let’s find out
People will contact me to ask about it
Not if it is well documented, … maybe if they want to collaborate