A PhD student’s experience with open research data

A PhD student’s experience with

open research data

J.A. Pascoe

2

Challenge the future

Why Open Data / Datacentrum?

• Idealism: Public funds -> public data

• Rules: H2020 and NWO moving toward requiring open data

4

Challenge the future

Why Open Data / Datacentrum?

• Self-protection:

• High profile fraud cases -> ‘lost’ data not acceptable

• Ease of use: Data is safely backed-up

Issues to keep in mind

• Increased scrutiny

• File formats

• Metadata / organise for ‘audience’

• Archive is frozen

6

Challenge the future

My experience

• Fatigue crack growth experiments

• Raw Data

• Crack length

• Fatigue machine outputs

• Processed data

My experience

• Create new folder / subfolder structure especially for the dataset • Select data (ready to be ‘frozen’, supports a publication)

• Format data into .csv, .dat, .txt, etc. • Add descriptive headers

• Write ‘read-me’ files in .txt and .pdf (equations)

• Upload to 3TU.Datacentrum

• Obtain DOI (can be pre-allocated)

8

My experience

• 1 Conference paper, 1 journal paper (under review) based on data, both cite dataset

• Dataset uploaded concurrently with publication submission

• Journal paper: reviewer checked data & suggested additions

• Supplementary dataset

10

Challenge the future

My experience

• Approached by Italian researcher

• Has computer model, but not experimental data

• Could share data by e-mailing 1 url

• Need account to access data

• Dutch University

• OpenID

• 3TU.Datacentrum account