Every student must produce a Data Management Plan. It is relevant to ALL disciplines.
“Research Data” can exist in many forms, from large digital data sets, images and audio files of various formats, through to art installations and hardcopy laboratory note books, research notes and writing/notes in the form of Word documents. It includes digital files and paper copies of e.g. notes, reference sources, transcripts, printouts (which researchers may choose to scan and store as digital files), as well as physical artefacts. ANYTHING that a researcher produces during the pursuit of their research is ‘research data’.
Directors of Studies will be expected to guide research degree students in the management of their data. It is expected that the same data standards are applied to internally funded research projects as to externally funded ones.
You need to think about the whole lifecycle of the project – including safe storage and back up of everything during the project itself, retention and storage once the project is finished (research student data should also be stored for 10 years after they have left – this is the supervisor’s responsibility).
When students leave it will be expected that they will leave all their data behind them, although it will often be the case that the University will be happy for them to take copies of that data before they leave.
In many cases it is expected that final research data are available for open access and re-use where appropriate and under appropriate safeguards. There will be opportunities for data to be kept confidential but it is expected that this will be the exception not the rule. Final research data is assumed to mean data prepared to enable a third party to mine and exploit it. As an example, data can be shared through Oxford Brookes Repository RADAR - it will be kept for a minimum of ten years or ten years from when the last request to access was made.
Training on ‘managing your research records and your data management plan’ for research students and for supervisors is available as part of the Graduate College training programme – see the supervisor training and research student training.
Training on "data management", which forms part of our optional sessions for newly appointed research-active staff on the First Three Years EXPLORE@Brookes programme, and is also open to any other research-active staff who may be interested.