Research Data
Assessment of the Data to be Shared
Researchers should decide which data sets will be shared, considering, among other things, their reuse prospects and the costs involved. The following checklist provides several criteria to consider.
Data Preparation
- Tidy DataThis article written by Hadley Wickham "tackles a small, but important, component of data cleaning: data tidying. Tidy datasets are easy to manipulate, model and visualize, and have a specific structure: each variable is a column, each observation is a row, and each type of observational unit is a table."
Data Confidentiality
Data to be shared should comply with the confidentiality, security, and legal requirements with regard to personal and sensitive data, as is often the case in the medical field. In order to do this, the data must be anonymized.
When journals ask to make data shareable
Tool developped by the Fonds de recherche du Quebec to help decide whether your data is shareable.
Licenses
In Canada, raw data is generally not protected by the Copyright Act.
It is mandatory to choose a license to share your data.
A decision tree to determine if a researcher has the right to make their data open was created by Force11, "a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing".
- Open Data Commons"Legal tools for open data".
- How to License Research Data (Digital Curation Center)Decide how to apply a licence to your research data, and which licence would be most suitable.
