Love Data Week: 10-14 February

Coinciding with Valentine’s week is Love Data Week (10-14 February), which you can follow on Twitter with the hashtag #LoveData20.

Love Data Week encourages researchers to think about how they look after their data, and whether they’re treating it right. Data is for life (or the ten years your funder requires that you keep it!), not just Love Data Week, but it’s a good time to start thinking about it.

Did you know that the University requests:

• all research projects to have a Data Management Plan
• data to be shared alongside publications (where possible)
• data access statements to be included in all publications

All is FAIR in love

To ensure your data is useful to both others and you in the future, make it as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) as possible. Be thorough in describing your data wherever it’s stored and make sure others can access it and reuse it.

Share the love

When others can easily find and cite your data, everyone benefits. A clear reuse license and indexing in search engines like Google helps encourage discoverability and reuse.

Love at first cite

It has been shown that research articles receive more citations when they have their underlying data openly linked to them.

The earlier you start loving your data by storing it securely, documenting it thoroughly, and making it discoverable for others to cite and reuse, the easier it is. However, it’s never too late to start!

Do you README?

Creating a README text file – a document that explains other files in a directory – not only helps others understand your data, but it helps you remember your processes and the context for the research when you access it in the future. You can also use metadata – information describing your research outputs – to further document your research so it’s discoverable by others.

What are the library team doing in Love Data Week?

We will be hosting a coffee morning in the Kings Norton Library atrium on Friday 14 February, 10:30am-12pm.

Please come along to meet our Research Support team, including our new Research Data Manager, Greg Simpson. It’s an opportunity for you to ask them any questions you may have about managing, storing and publishing your research data or using our data repository CORD. You will also be able to test your research publishing and data management knowledge with our popular Impact Game.

And if you know someone else who would benefit from finding out about how to manage *their* research data, then bring a data buddy with you!

If you can’t make it to our coffee morning, you can still follow @knl_mirc this week as we focus our tweets on how to manage and publish your research data.

To find out more about managing your data, you can also visit our research data management web pages.

This Love Data Week, what are you doing to encourage the love of data?

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash