The most frequently asked questions about research data publication are answered below. If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact the UW/H contact and service point for RDM: annette.strauch-davey@spam protectuni-wh.de

There are circumstances in which the data should not be published or should only be published under certain conditions. The most important prerequisite for publication is that you have the right to do so (copyright issues!). On the other hand, confidential, personal data may be involved, which may only be published after anonymization or with the consent of the person concerned.

The owners of the rights to the research data are the researchers themselves, the employer or the client or (private sector) partners. The contractual relationships determine who may or must be asked about the transfer or publication of research data. TU Dresden has created a decision tree to help you as a scientist with legal questions that arise when publishing research data.

In order to make research data findable, the collection of metadata is particularly important. Various subject-specific metadata standards have become established in this area. They support the "interoperable" criterion of the FAIR principles in the best possible way. The use of standards in machine-readable form, in addition to those readable by humans, makes an important contribution to the interoperability of research data. Ontologies help with keyword assignment, e.g. the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus in the life sciences.

The assignment of persistent identifiers, e.g. a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for research data, enables citation. This means a gain in reputation for authors.

In the FRL, digital research data can be recorded independently as well as in connection with scientific publications and published free of charge up to 1 terabyte. An exception is data with a personal reference, which is subject to data protection.
Advice is available at forschungsdaten@spam protectzbmed.de.