Not only disclosing the result: Open Access research data

Research data are a central element of scientific activity and the associated knowledge gain. Survey results on favorite soccer clubs, measurement results on guinea pig food rations, recordings of language dialects or bird songs, text corpora from comics or newspaper articles, transcriptions of flirting conversations, image files of microscope photographs or floodplains, computer models of climate change – there is virtually nothing that could not serve as data collection for research.

This data, which is often unique, very time-consuming to generate, and which can be very large in some disciplines, has so far mostly been kept "in a drawer" by the respective scientists. In the meantime, however, it has been recognized that these important data should be adequately indexed, archived and made available for future use. To this end, the university has adopted a code of ethics,  Rules of Good Scientific Practice, which commits Münster's scientists to the principles of scientific honesty and fairness. In addition, the University of Münster adopted Research Data Management Policy in 2017. Among other things, this means that primary data are stored securely for at least ten years at the institution where they were created.

Therefore, an important step of a research project, and one that is required by many funders, is to make the data public so that it can be re-used in other scientific projects, for example.

How does it work and what should be considered? We inform you!
Research Data Management Portal of the University of Münster
Principles for handling research data at Münster University
Information on publishing research data