Research Data Management for Junior Researchers: Essential Knowledge and Fundamental Steps (506)

1 December 2022

Dr Francesco Varrato ; Dr Jessica Pidoux ; Simon Dürr

Over the last few years, research data and its good management have become increasingly important. Proper data management and publication of research data is often required by funding bodies (e.g., the SNSF or EC) as well as journals. It ensures reproducibility, it facilitates reuse by other researchers and paves the way for automated analysis and text mining. Articles containing data on average receive about 25% more citations. Moreover, as professionals, researchers can no longer risk the loss of a dataset, nor the confusion over the way they obtained their results. Research Data Management (RDM) enhances the necessary, transversal skills to boost and improve research outputs, while fostering collaborations. Whether researchers' interest lies in the challenges of digital humanities or the advancements of machine learning, for a career in academia or in industry, they need to be equally aware of the recent developments in RDM and ready to provide the data that underpin their analyses and research results.

Learning Outcomes:

This workshop will provide the participants with the essential knowledge and concrete examples to tackle these requirements and to manage the entire data life cycle covering both qualitative and quantitative research.

Ultimately, participants will be able to:

• Understand the latest developments in Open Science, especially FAIR principles
• Plan their research and ensure compliance with policies and funders' requirements, by writing a Data Management Plan (DMP)
• Use digital formats that improve collaborations and increase research reproducibility
• Organize and document their datasets, considering naming conventions and metadata standards
• Analyze and improve their own data workflow, considering storage solutions, security issues, collaborative sharing, and back-ups
• Improve the data workflow by integrating specific tools such as Electronic Lab Notebooks, surveying platforms, anonymization software, etc.
• Understand the pros and cons of various platforms for data publication, such as data repositories, code repositories, databanks, or data papers
• Tackle possible legal and ethical issues, with reference to privacy by-design and specific data masking techniques
• Understanding issues when handling personal and sensitive data
• Annotate a dataset and go through the publication procedure on Zenodo
• Identify and use the most appropriate data license for publishing their datasets

University of Lausanne

Date: Thursday, 1st December 2022

Schedule: 9 am to 5 pm

Place: University of Lausanne

Trainers :

Jessica Pidoux has a PhD in Digital Humanities from the EPFL and a master degree in sociology of communication from the University of Lausanne. Her PhD research focused on dating apps' development practices and usages to formulate a new algorithmic-communication process established in online dating where the collection of personal-sensitive data and privacy risks remain underexplored.She is now the director of personaldata.io, a Swiss nonprofit making data rights actionable, and a post doctorate at SciencesPo Paris (CEE), where she investigates cooperation dynamics in Citizen Science projects. Jessica Pidoux is an active member of DataChampions-EPFL and MyData Global.

Simon Dürr is a PhD Student in Computational Chemistry at EPFL and is the research data manager of his laboratory where several hundreds of terabytes of data are generated yearly to tackle important problems in photovoltaics and the life sciences. He is a member of the Trainee Advisory Committee of the Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science, an EPFL Data Champion and creator of several open source projects related to data and publishing such as a virtual conference management software and a platform to share scientific illustrations.

Francesco Varrato obtained a PhD in Computational Physics from EPFL and, after a post-doc in the same institution, gained experience in teaching physics and math. He also worked as business development manager for different start-ups (Medical Devices, FinTech, FoodTech).
Since 2018, he is part of the EPFL Research Data Library Team, accompanying the EPFL research community in Research Data Management (RDM) best practices, organizing training sessions, promoting Open Research principles such as the FAIR, and supporting the EPFL Data Champions community.

Participants are eligible for reimbursement of incurred travel expenses by train between the city of their university and the location of the workshop (half-fare card, 2nd class).

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