Roles and Responsibilities. RDM Costs

Creating and updating of the DMP is a collective effort. However, to facilitate the completion of the project, to ensure the quality of its results and data, and to publish articles, persons responsible for each step of this effort need to be appointed.

Responsibilities can be taken according to positions or workflow.

Principal investigators (Project leaders)

• should make sure that all members of the research group, including doctoral students, are aware of the data management policy of the group
• should be responsible for the creation and complementing of the DMP during the whole project
• are responsible for signing and carrying out all binding agreements
• coordinate data management in cooperation projects
• plan data management-related expenses

Supervisors of doctoral students

• support doctoral students in the creation of DMP by supervising and solving specific problems
• ensure that doctoral students acquire data management skills
• make sure that the underlying data and software of PhD theses will be managed and published as the FAIR data, suitable for storing in repositories

Doctoral students

• are responsible for ensuring that the data they have collected are organised and documented according to the DMP
• make sure that their data will be the FAIR data at the end of the project
• when facing problems, ask for help and training

Responsibilities may be shared by the operations carried out with the data or by work flows.

It is necessary to determine the persons responsible for collecting data, for documenting and providing it with metadata, and for data protection and making of backups.

The research group working on a project is also supported by other structural units of the university, such as the Grant Office, the IT Office and the Library.

If additional staff is hired, it is necessary to inform them about their role and responsibilities.

Data Management Costs

It is advisable to indicate the data management costs already when applying for a grant. Costs occur at each stage of the data life cycle.

Data collection 

One of the possibilities is to purchase the data. If the data is collected by the group members, some guidelines or patterns for data collections may be needed.

If the data consists of video interviews or recorded interviews of target group members, it is necessary to transcribe the recordings. To save the time of highly qualified researchers, it is advisable to hire students who need part-time work.

It may be necessary to translate the interviews or other similar materials, but the translation service is expensive and should be taken into account beforehand.

Still some other aspects need to be considered when collecting data:

• If personal data is collected, you have to make sure whether the group has necessary competence for drawing up the forms for obtaining consent. It is necessary to find out whether the consultations of a data protection specialist are free of charge or for a fee 
• Can you obtain the software needed for data collection free of charge, or should it be purchased, or do you need to develop it yourself?
• Do you have the necessary hardware? Can it handle the planned volume of your data?
• How do you collect data during field work, do you need some special equipment? Is it necessary to offer special training to the persons who will collect data and use the equipment?

Documentation 

It is inexpensive when done continuously, but when it has to be done retrospectively, it can be expensive and sometimes even impossible to do.

Data analysis 

You have to consider whether you need any new soft- and hardware, and whether your group members need training sessions. For data analysis, you can use services for a fee offered by other institutions, e.g., the processing of big data at the UT High Performance Computing Centre, or a service for a fee from the UT Center for Statistical Consultancy. S

Storing and making of backups 

The main IT services offered by the university are free of charge; for other solutions, a fee may be charged. The need for storage space and its cost will depend on the expected volume of the data.

Scanning or digitising and optical character recognition (OCR) requires soft- and hardware and manpower. You should also consider data protection, e.g., whether you need a separate server for sensitive data. Do you need some additional equipment, as backups have to be made regularly and at least one copy of the backup has to be stored at some other location?

Long-time storage and sharing of data

Preparation of data for sharing may be labour-consuming if the data has to be converted into other formats. You must make sure that all your data are anonymised, but in case of audio and video files, it is a hard and time-consuming work.

On this stage, you may also need some legal advice to make sure that all problems related with copyrights or licences will be correctly solved.

Institutional data repositories usually do not charge a fee. Storing of big data in any repository is a chargeable service, but the fees may vary greatly.

If your research involves big data, it may be advisable to hire a data manager who is skilful in handling data, can be responsible for the data management of the whole work group and can offer advice and training.

If your cooperation partners are from abroad, you need to plan for the costs of organising meetings and seminars.

A poster that illustrates the costs of RDM:  openaire_rdm_researcher_costs.pdf

Resource: O’Connor, Ryan, Delipalta, Alexandra, & Jones, Sarah. (2020). What will it cost to manage and share my data?. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3837717

In this context, it is also very interesting to look at the sources from which the cost of storing the data is covered and how the money is distributed according to the position of the researcher:

Resource: European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, European Research Data Landscape – Final report, Publications Office of the European Union, 2022, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/3648