Volume 62, Issue 1 - Research Data Management / Guest Editor: Andreas Heuer, Host Editor: Richard Lenz

In this article, we analyze the state of research data in mathematics. We find that while the mathematical community embraces the notion of open data, the FAIR principles are not yet sufficiently realized. Indeed, we claim that the case of mathematical data is special, since the objects of interest are abstract (all properties can be known) and complex (they have a rich inner structure that must be represented). We present a novel classification of mathematical data and derive an extended set of FAIR requirements, which accomodate the special needs of math datasets. We summarize these as deep FAIR . Finally, we show a prototypical system infrastructure, which can realize deep FAIRness for one category (tabular data) of mathematical datasets.

As the importance of data in today’s research increases, the effective management of research data is of central interest for reproducibility. Research is often conducted in large interdisciplinary consortia that collaboratively collect and analyse such data. This raises the need of intra-consortia data sharing. In this article, we propose the use of data management platforms to facilitate this exchange among research partners. Based on the experiences of a large research project, we customized the CKAN software to satisfy these needs for intra-consortia data sharing.

Research data management planning (RDMP) is the process through which researchers first get acquainted with research data management (RDM) matters. In recent years, public funding agencies have implemented governmental policies for removing barriers to access to scientific information. Researchers applying for funding at public funding agencies need to define a strategy for guaranteeing that the acquired funds also yield high-quality and reusable research data. To achieve that, funding bodies ask researchers to elaborate on data management needs in documents called data management plans (DMP). In this study, we explore several organizational and technological challenges occurring during the planning phase of research data management, more precisely during the grant submission process. By doing so, we deepen our understanding of a crucial process within research data management and broaden our understanding of the current stakeholders, practices, and challenges in RDMP.

The Open Science agenda holds that science advances faster when we can build on existing results. Therefore, research data must be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) in order to advance the findability, reproducibility and reuse of research results. Besides the research data, all the processing steps on these data – as basis of scientific publications – have to be available, too. For good scientific practice, the resulting research software should be both open and adhere to the FAIR principles to allow full repeatability, reproducibility, and reuse. As compared to research data, research software should be both archived for reproducibility and actively maintained for reusability. The FAIR data principles do not require openness, but research software should be open source software. Established open source software licenses provide sufficient licensing options, such that it should be the rare exception to keep research software closed. We review and analyze the current state in this area in order to give recommendations for making research software FAIR and open.