At EPFL, the Library Research Data Management team is at your disposal to provide you with expert advice, support, and solutions. This page offers tips and tools, best practices, and funders / institutional guidelines for planning your data management. In addition, a dedicated service is in place to assist you in preparing your Data Management Plan (DMP) or to support EPFL’s funders for DMP reviews.
Good Research Data Management practices allow researchers to:
- Save time and duplication of effort, facilitating the re-use of data and guaranteeing their integrity by preventing them from becoming lost or corrupted;
- Increase efficiency and impact of the research with good practices in use, dissemination, and sharing;
- Ensure compliance with obligations and policies on data protection and security;
- Ensure that the data produced are FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).
- Reduce the carbon footprint of storage and computational resources.
The Data Management Plan (DMP)
The DMP is a document that plans the life cycle of the data: it offers a long-term perspective by outlining how data will be generated, collected, documented, shared, and preserved in the long run, consistently with the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reproducibility) principles (for more information on FAIR data at EPFL, see also here).
In a DMP, researchers describe their data (e.g. with metadata, naming conventions, formats, licenses, data collections…) as clearly as possible, in order to be able to re-use them and share them in the future.
If you manage or are involved in more than one project under the same umbrella (research groups, consortia, NCCR…), it is beneficial to establish an RDM strategy: it provides a roadmap for all the members to understand roles and responsibilities, and defines tools and standards for overall data management.
Getting help with your DMP: templates and reviews
The Library Research Data Management team is at your disposal to guide you through and review your DMPs. You can download here below the DMP templates for different research funders, to ease your DMP submission and follow-up. If you are an EPFL faculty or central service, the RDM team can assist you in reviewing your applicants’ DMPs.
Check also the funders’ guidelines below.
● Personal or otherwise sensitive data: [email protected] (Data Protection Officer) and [email protected] (Research ethics)
● Data linked to industry: [email protected] (Technology Transfer Office)
In general, contact the Research Office at [email protected] for help with project management.
EPFL and funders’ guidelines
The following resources will help you stay compliant with research funders, as well as with EPFL own policies and guidelines for data management.
Useful tools
DMPonline
Online platform for the direct creation, review and sharing of your DMP, with custom templates depending on the funders or institutions’ requirements. Hosted in the UK by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), you can create a free account to use it.
DMP OPIDoR
Online platform for the direct creation, review and sharing of your DMP, with custom templates depending on the funders or institutions’ requirements. Hosted in France by the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST), you can create a free account to use it.
ARGOS
Open, free and extensible service – available as standalone (OpenDMP) and as a OpenAIRE service (ARGOS) that simplifies the management, validation, monitoring and maintenance of DMPs. It allows creating actionable DMPs. DMPs in ARGOS are treated as research outputs that can be assigned DOIs, licenses and can be redistributed in a FAIR manner.
Cost Calculator
Online and open source tool to evaluate the expenses for data storage that you might encounter during your research project, eg. Active Storage, ELN, Database, Data Repository, Collaborative Repository.
Green Algorithms Calculator
The Green Algorithms project aims at promoting more environmentally sustainable computational science. This calculator allows researchers to estimate the carbon footprint of their projects.
DMP checklist
Checklist with guiding questions to find out how to improve your DMP, or to self-evaluate your Research Data Management (RDM) practices.