Data Preservation and Re-use

Data preservation involves actions and procedures to keep data for future use, and includes data archiving and/or data submission to a data repository. Data preservation needs data description,  documentation and metadata. The goal of all these actions is to make data findable, comprehensible and easy to use. It also involves long-term preservation and curation of data.

Documentation provides an overview of the research context and design, data collection methods, data preparation and results or findings and is key to enabling the secondary user to make informed use of the data.

Metadata are providing standardized structured information explaining the purpose, origin, time references, geographic location, creator, access conditions and terms of use of data.

DOI: digital object identifier is a unique and persistent identifier makes data easy to find and cite data sets.

Data re-use means data mining, replication research, comparative studies, longitudinal research etc. E.g. data collected for one research objective can be used in a new study dealing with some other similar problem.