Data policies guide decision making in research data management (RDM). They make provisions for multiple aspects of the data lifecycle ranging from data collection to data disposal, establish criteria for accessing and sharing data, and ensure that RDM best practices are implemented consistently in an organisation.
For institutions interested in sustainable RDM, data policies should also address environmental, social, and economic aspects related to data management. Policies should promote approaches that lower the environmental footprint of research data by clearly selecting the type of data to be archived and having a clear workflow for disposing of the data not needed. They should offer equitable access to research data not only by making the data open whenever possible, but also by selecting technology solutions that require lower bandwidth for downloading the data and that allow users to preview and select individual records without the need to download datasets in bulk. Sustainable data policies must also address funding aspects and openly mention market and non-market mechanisms, such as in-house funding and fee-based models, that are expected to support data storage, curation, and management over time.
The checklist provided addresses the key elements that should be included in a sustainable data policy, but it can easily be extended and customised according to the needs of each organisation.
The checklist has been developed as part of the project “Promoting sustainable data practices and infrastructures in biodiversity science” (DFG Grant No. 528674292), Giuditta Parolini, Mareike Petersen, Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany, https://tinyurl.com/mwwnt6xu.
Licence
The checklist is licensed under a Zero-Clause BSD (https://opensource.org/license/0bsd) licence. The guide documents and the posters are licensed under CC-BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The English version of the poster is also available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17674043).