What would you do if you lost your research data tomorrow? Take the research data health check… and find help to secure, share and exploit your valuable research. Chances are you could use some helpful pointers in all of these! To find information, support, advice and training, as well as links to external resources, go to www.le.ac.uk/researchdata or email: researchdata@le.ac.uk fully understood your research funders’ data management requirements? Government and funders require that publicly funded research is made available for reuse – are you up to date with their latest policies? Your future funding might depend on it! written a data management plan? Your funder may already require this but build it in from the proposal stage to avoid headaches in the future. gained ethics approval/consent? Writing a data management plan will aid planning and help you to navigate ethics and governance requirements. protected your intellectual property? Leaving intellectual property considerations for a rainy day could lose you appropriate credit, damaging career prospects and perhaps your financial future health! clearly described, in terms of content (using standard metadata)? Ask yourself honestly: is there a danger of data being lost? Will you be able to remember how you generated your data, and will you or anyone else be able to find it in the future when you wish to reuse and share? clearly labelled with versions and dates? How will you remember which was the definitive version and which dataset was used in producing a given research outcome? logically structured and named? Once you’ve remembered how you generated data, can you still find the relevant files? future-proofed against broken links, using persistent identifiers? The persistent identification of digital resources can play a vital role in enabling their accessibility and re-usability over time using recommended data standards. how to restrict access to your research data to the right people? Have you consulted with university or data centre experts so that only the right people have access to your research? which data to keep and which data to discard? Managing research data effectively means being selective: which data to discard and when as well as what to keep and for how long? how securely your data is stored? What happens if your storage media fail? How resilient is it? Could it get left on the train and could somebody else misuse it? how your data is backed-up? Have you made use of university and/or external resources to back up data so that you have multiple copies in case of loss or theft? Organise Create Have you... Are your research files and data... Do you know... Keep find existing information resources related to your research? Where can you find research data that you can repurpose or combine with your own to produce new research? share data with your collaborators securely and effectively? Whether building a collaborative proposal, generating results for others to comment on or sharing the final outputs of your research – how will you link with your colleagues ahead of wider sharing? deposit your research data and outputs in an open repository? Is there an appropriate disciplinary or institutional repository and what do you need to do to deposit your research output? Plan ahead to avoid refactoring... publish your research, and get it cited as well? Institutions and data centres must make research data reusable to others while providing credit to the researchers who did the work. Your future career could depend on it! Find & Share Do you know how to...