The German Research Foundation’s Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice and the Statute for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice at Freie Universität Berlin outline the key requirements of research data management.

Increasingly, research data management plans are not just recommended by external funding bodies and institutions, but have in fact become a core component of funding criteria. This applies to funding lines on various levels (regional, national, and international) and for disciplines ranging from the natural and life sciences, to the humanities, right through to the social sciences.

Growing numbers of institutions such as colleges, universities, institutes, and research foundations are developing guidelines and policies on how to consistently handle research data responsibly.

By publishing your data, you are supporting the open access principle and contributing to making science and research free and accessible for everyone.

With the aid of data formats that facilitate subsequent use and publication, your data can be accessed and reused in follow-up projects as well as within future research groups and projects. This doesn’t just boost the visibility of your research, but your scientific reputation is also enhanced each time your data are quoted. New cooperative relationships can also arise from new research findings.

Systematically saving and regularly backing up data minimizes the risk of data loss during the research process. This is an issue especially for projects with multiple people working together at different sites and times. It is also important to have steps in place to ensure data integrity for when the funding period ends.

Published data sets can be cited and are considered publications in their own right. This means that research data can contribute to building the scientific reputation system.

Documented and published research data make it much easier to reproduce methods. Sharing data on a publication makes research results more reliable; some publishers even request such underlying data on publications.

An important advantage of research data management is that it will save you plenty of time because correctly designating, documenting, and organizing data allows you to easily maintain a clear overview of the data at hand as well as quickly find and process specific data sets. This proves particularly useful in the context of teams and project groups with frequent staff or researcher changes, or whose data have to be processed by or made available to several partners at a number of different sites.

When it comes to subsequent use, publishing and sharing data with third parties prevents duplication of effort for collecting the same or similar data.