RDM policy & requirements

VU Amsterdam endorses the VSNU Code of Ethical research and expects that all research conducted by its researchers will be stored securely and remain transparent and verifiable several years after the research is done.

Read more in the RDM Policy of VU Amsterdam and individual faculties.

Publishing your data

Instead of archiving research data in a data repository, you may choose to publish an article about your data collection. This is not necessarily common for all disciplines. Examples of journals where you can publish your data can be found on the reference page.

Tools for archiving

VU Amsterdam requests that researchers archive the data used in a publication in a repository for at least ten years after the release of the publication. There are several digital archives and many more keep appearing.

The VU Amsterdam archive tools are:

- Yoda

- DataverseNL

The RDM Support Desk and faculty data stewards can help researchers to select a repository that meets all the relevant criteria of privacy (sensitivity), dataset size, etc.

Metadata and Data Documentation

Data documentation takes various forms and describes the data on multiple levels. The description of the dataset and data object is also referred to as metadata, i.e., data about the data. One way to add metadata is to attach a README file to your data.

In addition to describing their own datasets and objects, researchers can also cross-refer to the project proposal where other researchers can find information about the research, such as the aims and goals, methodology and data collection, the persons responsible for the project, and so on. Both the type of research and nature of the data also influence what kind of documentation is necessary.

Different types of data are governed by different standards, and these should be taken into account when documenting data.