Research Data Management 101
Completion requirements
Read this lesson. Pay attention to the lifecycle (process) of data sets. Answer the questions in this lesson.
Data lifecycle management (DLM) is the policy or process that governs organizational data use. You learned that data management is an administrative function and DLM is a process to manage and preserve that data. Remember, good DLM includes all the phases of the data lifecycle. This is essential to data-driven decisions and actions taken by organizations daily.
Sharing & Preserving Data
Sharing Data: additional considerations
Intellectual Property & Confidentiality
- Data is not copyrightable, but an expression of data can be.
- MIT or the funder may own your data (consult with the Technology Licensing Office)
- You can share your data if you, in fact, own it
- You can license data to limit what others can do with it (e.g., require attribution)
- It's incumbent upon you to police usage of your data
- Look at Creative Commons Licenses, including the CC0 Declaration to emphatically put it in the
- public domain
- Confidential and sensitive data requires additional consideration and planning
Journal requirements
- Many journals require that underlying data accompany published articles, usually found in "instructions for authors"
- More resources at http://libraries.mit.edu/datamanagement/share/journal-requirements/
Using other people's data
- Make sure that data doesn't have a license agreement that prevents you from sharing the data
- Most databases to which the MIT Libraries subscribe are licensed and carry restrictions on use, but many do allow for educational and research use, which allows for sharing limited portions of data.