The components of research data management

Adequate research data management can be divided into three components:

●     Data storing and sharing during research
●     Data organisation, documentation and metadata
●     Long-term preservation

All three components are connected to each other: when sharing data during research, documentation is important for the correct interpretation of data files and prevention of multiple copies and meaningless file names. Besides, without organizing and documenting research data, long-term preservation is meaningless and replication of data would be impossible.

All different components mentioned above will make research data FAIR (FORCE11): Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. This is also mentioned in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ALLEA, 2017). These principles define characteristics that research data should exhibit to assist discovery and reuse by third-parties.