“Research data management concerns the organization, storage, preservation, and sharing of data that is collected or analysed during a research project. Proper planning and management of research data will make project management easier and more efficient while projects are being performed. It also facilitates sharing and allows others to validate as well as reuse the data. Also, funding agencies are recognizing the importance of research data management and some now request Data Management Plans (DMP) as part of the grant application process.” (NBIS)
Here we give an overview of available resources regarding research data management relevant to Swedish researchers working on COVID-19 and Pandemic Preparedness research.
Data management resources
National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS) and SciLifeLab Data Centre
- ENA submission guidelines - guidance developed to aid submissions to the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA)
- SciLifeLab Data Stewardship Wizard, DSW - a customised tool for creating Data Management Plans (DMPs) with templates conforming to the requirements of the Swedish Research Council and other stakeholders
- SciLifeLab Data Management Helpdesk - data stewards from NBIS and SciLifeLab Data Centre are available to discuss and provide support regarding data management questions
- SciLifeLab Research Data Management Guidelines - NBIS and SciLifeLab Data Centre have aggregated resources related to life science reseach data management in Sweden. Guidelines are available for each stage of the data lifecycle
Infectious Disease Toolkit (IDTk)
The Infectious Diseases Toolkit (IDTk) is a community effort to expose best practices and showcase solutions to data challenges affecting the response to infectious diseases outbreaks. It was created as part of the BY-COVID project.
This resource contains information specific for the management of infectious disease data. Specifically, it includes information about management at every part of the data lifecycle for data related to pathogen characterisation, socioeconomic data, human biomolecular data, and human clinical and health data.
Information is available specifically about the resources related to infectious disease for Sweden.
ELIXIR Research Data Management Kit (RDMkit)
The ELIXIR Research Data Management Kit (RDMkit) is an online guide containing good data management practices applicable to research projects from the beginning to the end. Developed and managed by people who work every day with life science data, the RDMkit has guidelines, information, and pointers to help you with problems throughout the data’s life cycle. RDMkit supports FAIR data — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable — by-design, from the first steps of data management planning to the final steps of depositing data in public archives.
Information is organised by role (e.g. researcher, data steward), scientific domain (e.g. proteomics, human data, bioimaging data), tasks (e.g. data analysis, data management plan, licensing).
Information is specifically available for research data management in Sweden.
Swedish National Data Service (SND)
The Swedish National Data Service has put together guidelines on research data management in general, applicable to all fields of science.
- Plan - Data Management Plan, Funding Application, Ethical Review, Agreements with Other Parties, Research Material with Personal Data, Protect the Data
- Organize - Folder Structure, File Format
- Document
- Work with Data - Data Loss, Data Errors, Well-Organised Data, Access, Shared Work Files, Software
- Prepare and Share - Reuse, Documentation for Reuse, The FAIR Data Principles, PID (persistent identifiers), Licenses, Embargos, and Restrictions, Publication and Open Access
- Guides - Checklist for Data Management Plan, Choosing a File Format
Other useful resources
- Research Data Management 1 Day Workshop (Sara El-Gebali, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4562630) - Materials for 1 full-day workshop on Research Data Management basics covering topics including FAIR and Open data, and electronic lab books.
- SciLifeLab tutorial videos on Data Management - on what is Data Management, Data Management Plan, introduction to Data Stewardship Wizard.
Hands-on data management support
All researchers affiliated with a university or research institute in Sweden working on research topics relevant to pandemic preparedness can receive free individual consultations and hands-on help within reasonable bounds from the Swedish Pathogens Portal team. Simply send an email to data-management@scilifelab.se or pathogens@scilifelab.se. Your question will be assigned to a data steward with relevant expertise who can either help you directly or point you to the correct tool or service.
You are welcome to send both general questions about best approaches to research data management, data management plans (DMPs), reproducibility, FAIR, and open science as well as specific questions about your research projects such as which repository to choose to deposit data, what the suitable metadata standards would be, which file formats to use, etc. In some cases the data stewards can act as brokers and submit data to repositories on your behalf.