Storing and handling data

Use your data management plan (DMP) to help you understand, identify and plan for the storage you need.

The Principal Investigator (PI) is responsible for data management during the research project. The whole project team should support the PI and engage in data management activities throughout.

Your plan should include:

• data characteristics eg volume, cost to reproduce, frequency of change
• data back-up procedures, including all institutions/collaborations and transferring data generated in the field.
• data access arrangements for local or external research collaborators
• shared folder and file naming and versioning conventions across the team
• allotted responsibility for the immediate day-to-day management, storage and backup of the research data.

Keep your DMP up-to-date

Regularly updating your DMP can reduce the risk of data loss and provide a framework to support both ethical and legal data handling and open research practices, including data sharing where appropriate.

Personal data and records retention

All retention of personal data must be justifiable within the applicable laws and research materials should be managed in accordance with the University’s Records Retention Schedule.

There’s also information for researchers on the information governance intranet page (available to University staff only) that outlines how data protection laws affect research data, informed consent and the research participant privacy notice, and processing personal information.

End-of-project data considerations

At the end of any project you should carry out a full review of the data outputs and carefully consider:

• what data assets are no longer needed and can be deleted (above and beyond those deleted because of data sharing agreements)
• what data assets need to be retained and how they can be curated for long-term use, for example through deposit in a data centre or data repository
• what is the appropriate storage location(s) for retained data.

You should make sure that:

• there is agreement on long-term ownership of the datasets
• there is agreement on how long the data will be retained
• you can demonstrate that you have appropriate consent to store the data
• the storage is appropriately funded for the necessary retention period
• the data is discoverable to ensure that its value is not lost through obscurity.

Open and FAIR data

The University’s Research data management policy outlines our commitment to openly sharing research data of long term value that underpins published results, adopting a “share what you can – explain where you can’t” approach.

Open Data is a key aspect of Open Research. Open data can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose. It is made available under an open licence such as Creative Commons. Not all data can be made open due to commercial or personal data considerations. However, data can be FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable – without being open: restricted-access data could be FAIR if the descriptive metadata is openly accessible.

Research Data Leeds is the University’s data repository and will help to make your research data available under the FAIR principles.