Introduction
The FAIR data principles are international guidelines for research data management that aim to optimise the reuse of research data. This is achieved by making research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
Researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel can rely on support from the Research Information & Data Management Office when setting up a Research Data Management Plan (DMP) and for information on Open Data, Open Access and Research Data Management.
The Research Data Management Sharepoint Page contains resources on what to do before, during, and after your research. This includes topics such as making your research reproducible, data types, documentation & metadata, using an Electronic Lab Notebook and licensing, preserving and publishing your data. This Sharepoint Page should always be consulted when starting a new research project.
Information on this page aims to supplement the official advice given by the Research Information & Data Management Office by highlighting some domain specific resources.
Open Data Formats
To create open data it is important that we avoid using proprietary file types. This does not only ensure that our data can be reused by a larger group of researchers, but it is also important when archiving research data for future internal use. By sticking to open standards we take away the risk that a proprietary piece of software is discontinued rendering our data inaccessible.
We list some important Open Data formats that we feel are important in the domains in which we operate:
International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)
The IIIF Standard (pronounced “triple-eye-eff”) is a way to standardize the delivery of images and audio/visual files from servers to different environments on the Web where they can then be viewed and interacted with in many ways.
The IIIF specifications align with general Web standards that define how all browsers work to enable richer functionality beyond viewing an image or audio/visual files. For images, that means enabling deep zoom, comparison, structure (i.e., for an object such as a book, structure = page order) and annotation. For audio/visual materials, that means being able to deliver complex structures (such as several reels of film that make up a single movie) along with things like captions, transcriptions/translations, annotations, and more.
IIIF makes these objects work in a consistent way. That enables portability across viewers, the ability to connect and unite materials across institutional boundaries, and more. For more information check out the plain language guide to how the IIIF api’s work.
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI-XML)
The TEI Consortium develops a set of guidelines and software infrastructure or developing machine-actionable cultural heritage texts. By ensuring that your data is compatible with this format all software designed for this standard can operate on your data. Check out the TEIGarage for a collection of tools that can convert between TEI-XML and a variety of other file formats.
The Rotterdam Exchange Format Initiative (REFI-QDA)
The REFI-QDA Standard aims to provide interoperability between Qualitative Data Analysis Software. This standard is (partially) supported by (amongst others) NVivo, ATLAS.ti and MaxQDA. It is strongly recommended that if you use any of these tools that you also export your data in this open format so researchers without access to these paid tools can still use your data.
Data Repositories
The long term storage of data is very important.
We recommend the VUB Institutional Data Repository (as adviced by the Research Information & Data Management Office) for any research data that cannot be shared publicly.
For data that can be shared publicly we recommend considering the DARIAH-DE repository rather than a generic repository such as zenodo. The DARIAH-DE repository is a digital long-term archive for human and cultural-scientific research data. Each object described and stored in the DARIAH-DE Repository gets a unique and lasting Persistent Identifier (DOI) with which it is permanently referenced, cited, and kept available for the long term. In addition, the DARIAH-DE Repository enables the sustainable and secure archiving of data collections. This repository is part of the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
We further recommend the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace as a place to share not only raw datasets but also tools & services, workflows and training materials. This helps contribute to open science by ensuring all relevant components can remain connected and discoverable.
Reproducible Research
We strongly recommend taking the VUB internal training on Reproducable Research when designing a new research project. In our field we recommend that you make use of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace to share all the additional information (software artifacts, workflows, …) when publishing research.
If your research makes use of computational methods, consider using Quarto or Jupyter Notebooks in combination with open code repositories and platforms such as Binder to interactively share your computational methods.