Would you pay to open your data?
Responsible data management and making data openly available requires consideration of a wide range of aspects, not the least of which should be costs.
A typical cost of opening data arises from the amount of work required to organise and describe the data. Bringing data into such a shape that an outsider can utilise it and understand the context related to the production of the original data can be a big job even for a small dataset, if the collection of the data and the prevailing conditions during the collection have not been systematically described from the very beginning.
A more surprising cost may be that opening data can be subject to a fee. Many providers aim to make the researcher's everyday life and research process easier by offering various services to support e.g., data management and publication. This may seem like an easy solution in busy everyday life, especially if there is no time to determine the reliability and responsibility of various publishing services.
Should a researcher then pay to publish their data in accordance with open science and the FAIR principles? The researcher will in effect at the same time pay for the visibility of their research. Of course, on the other side of the coin is the idealistic thought that money may provide better services that benefit researchers. However, the researcher's budget may be tight, especially if there is a lot of data to be published and the costs are charged based on the number of files. These costs may not even have been considered in the project's budget, which may make publication unreasonably difficult.
Choosing the right service emphasizes careful planning
Fortunately, the world of data management does not rely solely on commercial providers. There are various free services for publishing data, that aim to secure the researcher's right to make their output openly available at no cost. It is a good idea to spend some time choosing a service and to consider possible places for publishing the data as early as possible in the research process.
Services focusing on data storage and sharing can be searched, for example, in the Re3data service. Research data can be stored in FSD’s Aila portal free of charge, and different degrees of openness can also be defined for the data. Finland also has the Fairdata set of services maintained by CSC, of which the IDA service is intended for storing data.
Tampere University also wants to ensure that researchers and research groups have access to appropriate research data management infrastructures, systems, and services that enable the opening of produced research data for further use and reuse (see Open Science Policy).
Opening research data requires data management expertise, which emphasises careful and responsible planning of the data and taking into account the principles of research ethics throughout the life cycle of the research project. Going through all these topics would require its own article, but reading the library's guide to data management will get you far.
Help with data management planning is available from Research Data Services researchdata [at] tuni.fi (researchdata[at]tuni[dot]fi).
Authors: Jari Friman, Katja Fält, Saila Huuskonen, Päivi Malinen
English translation: Piatta Hellevaara
