Research Data Management

Basic principles

Research data are essential components of any research project and one of the pillars of Open Science. EPFL promotes excellence in scientific research, encourages (full) reproducibility of its research projects and incorporates the international FAIR principles. EPFL highlights the importance of sound management of data throughout their life cycle (including archiving).

Several funding sources require the establishment of a Data Management Plan (DMP) as a condition for funding projects. Such a plan aims to ensure proper management of data and code, and long-term backup. In particular, this is one of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s requirements for the majority of its funding programmes and one of the European Commission’s requirements in the context of its framework programmes for research. Furthermore, funding source requirements are leaning increasingly towards openness and the ready availability of data, at least those relating to publications produced throughout the funded projects.

In addition to the requirements of funding sources, a growing number of publishing houses are following this movement in terms of the openness and ready availability of data relating to publications.

EPFL offers its research teams a support service for managing research data throughout their life cycle. This service is provided by the EPFL Library and includes, amongst other things, personalised support for research- ers and research groups to enable them to meet the demands of funding sources and publishing houses, while ensuring the protection of their research results, notably through concrete assistance in the preparation of DMPs and the provision of technical infrastructure such as ACOUA (Academic Output Archive) for long-term storage, for example.

Responsabilities

All EPFL employees are responsible for the proper management of their own research data.

Heads of Unit ensure proper management of research data relating to any project in their unit.

Legal basis

• LEX 3.3.2 “Directive concerning research integrity and good scientific practice at EPFL”

Further informations 

• SNSF Open Research Data
• SNSF Data Management Plan (DMP) – Guidelines for researchers
• Guidelines on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data in Horizon 2020
• Open access – H2020 Online Manual : publication and data
• European commission and research data, new requirements from 2017
• Open Research Data and Data Management Plans Information for ERC grantees
• FAIR Data principles
• Information about research data on the EPFL Library website
• ACOUA (Academic Output Archive) (access with login only)
• ACOUA (support)
• DMPs templates and EPFL guidelines

Advice for day-to-day business 

Think in terms of data life cycle (creation, processing, analysing, storage, access and re-use of data) and document practices for a research project and for a group/a lab.

Add a brief section at the proposal submission stage outlining the main aspects of your data management policy (standards, access strategies, curation, storage) for your research project. This will help you to anticipate and integrate data management costs and to develop the Data Management Plan (DMP).

The DMP and a data management strategy are tools that help researchers in planning good data management for their own project. They describe what data will be produced during the research project, and how each type of data will be organised, classified, shared, distributed, protected, even anonymised, and archived. They also define who will be responsible for DMP implementation and establish procedures to be followed in terms of budget and intellectual property. See the chapter on “IT Security and Data Protection” for further information regarding the processing of computer data, as well as the chapter on “Data Protection”. The EPFL Library can be contacted for all questions relating to research data management.