Project organisation and your research data

Organising your research project

• Set goals and deadlines, with actions assigned to specific people. This will help keep your project on track and ensure accountability.
• Agree how you will work with your data including, file naming conventions, version control and data security
• Keep your data safe by saving digital files in multiple locations and making regular back ups. University storage is backed up regularly but it is important to have your own ‘back up’ folders, kept separately from your working files

Your research data: as open as possible and as closed as necessary

• Information, and accompanying administrative information, collected as part of your research, from which you draw conclusions
• Any material in any format gathered during your research
• The raw material which informs the output and thought process of your research, not the output of your research
• Essential evidence for your conclusions

We encourage researchers to share significant data that underpins the research findings described in your paper:

• • allows data to be tested and validated
  • allows data to be re-used for further research or in teaching
  • increasingly funders see sharing data as in the public interest in line with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) principles and guidelines for access to research data from public funding
  • reduces duplication of effort
  • may increase your citations

You can share underpinning data in addition to the Supplementary Information allowed by many journals. You may have restrictions on how to share your data openly, for example if it contains personal data that cannot be anonymised, or if it contains commercially sensitive information.

Data access statement & dataset Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

It is good practice (and a requirement of some funders) to include a data access statement in your manuscript, even if your underpinning data are not openly available:

• Openly available data: “All data supporting this study are openly available from the University of Southampton repository at https://doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/xxxxx“
• Restricted access (ethical, legal, commercial): “Due to ethical concerns, supporting data cannot be made openly available. Further information about the data and conditions for access are available from the University of Southampton repository: https://doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/xxxxx“
• Secondary analysis of existing data: “This study was a re-analysis of existing data that are publicly available from [organisation] at [web address]”

• No new data: “No new data were created during this study”

You can request a DOI for the data underlying your research publication before you submit your manuscript and include the details in your data access statement. We can register DOIs for data held within the university – typically the data is deposited via PURE into ePrints Soton, our institutional repository. The record of the dataset will be publicly available in ePrints Soton, and the data can be immediately accessible or securely stored elsewhere and available on request.