- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is publicly available data?
- Examples of publicly available databases
- Licences and data reuse
- Programmatic access
- Sharing your data
- Further learning
- Your feedback
- References
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Data management for publicly available data
Data management is just as important for use of publicly available data as it is if you were generating your own data. Here’s some factors you will need to consider and keep track of:
- What was the dataset identifier (a unique number given to that dataset)?
- Where and when did you access and download the data?
- What did you do to the data?
- How will you back up your documentation of what you do?
- Have you got the correct citations for the data?
- Who will you share the data with and how will you share it?
- What does your funder require you to do?
- Don’t forget the tools and software you use as well!
Creating a data management plan is a good way of ensuring effective data management before starting data collection and analysis.
Fortunately, there are tools available online to help guide you through the process of creating a data management plan, such as DMPonline (figure 4) and the Data stewardship wizard.
DMPonline also has some public data management plans to give you examples of how they can be filled in.
Lots of what you will need to keep track of is what’s referred to as ‘metadata’ or data about the data. Learn more about the kind of metadata that is used to describe publicly available data on the next page.