Research data management for students

What should you do with your research data when you have finished your thesis? You can get rid of it – throw it away, delete it, destroy it – but you have spent quite a lot of time collecting it. It may be of use to someone else, or perhaps you want to go on to doctoral studies and use the same data?

Discuss with your supervisor at an early stage what happens to your data after you have finished your thesis. There are usually five different possibilities:

1. You destroy your data, or at least some of it.

2. Your data is part of a research project that determines what happens to it.

3. Your supervisor takes care of your data for a possible verification period or for use by others. This is the practice in some subjects.

4. You open your data in a repository or archive.

5. You save a copy of your data on a secure hard drive for a verification period or for reuse, for example if you intend to go on to doctoral studies. This alternative is possible especially if your data does not include confidential or personal data.

A verification period means that your data is saved for a specific period of time for verification of your results. For a thesis that is not published as a peer-reviewed publication, 1–3 years is a suitable time. Not all subjects have a verification period.

If your data is deleted or destroyed, your final responsibility is to ensure that it is done correctly.

Please note that you do not have to open the raw data or all the data if you decide to publish or archive. You can also choose to share metadata only, and if you have sensitive data of various kinds (personal data, patents, innovations) you may not open this data. In that case, metadata is sufficient. Anonymized data, however, can be opened.

If your data is to be used by others, it becomes even more important that you have documented your process and created metadata during your study, so that others can understand your data! When you then transfer the data to an archive or data repository, or to your supervisor, you do not have to sit down and try to remember everything you did and, in a panic, write a guide for the use of the data – you already did this during the research process!

If you are studying a cultural subject, you may want to archive your material in the cultural sciences archive Cultura. Discuss with your supervisor, and if you agree that the material should be archived, contact Cultura before you start collecting your material! The archive has its own instructions that you should follow.

Another archive is the archive of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. If archiving at SLS is an option, you should contact them before you start collecting material.

ÅAU's Open Science Guidelines support openness, transparency and reuse of research data according to the FAIR principles, according to which data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. If you have handled your research data responsibly, it will be much easier to open your data in the end, and follow the FAIR principles.