Hanken adheres to responsible data management practices and ensures management and sharing of research data in accordance with legislations and research integrity.
Hanken endeavours to ensure the findability and citability of the research data produced by the school’s researchers, while sees to that the degree of data openness and sharing is ethically and legally justifiable. Hanken encourages that research data and related research results produced at Hanken are published open and available for shared use and beneficial to the society after the data creators and collectors have benefited from the data; that is, sufficient first-user privileges are ensured for data creators and collectors.
Reusing and benefiting from existing datasets is a fundamental motive of data opening and publishing. Research data are valuable resources that often require a lot of time and resources to create. It is thence worthwhile to consider reusing existing datasets that previous studies have generated and publicly archived. Reusing data, however, is not only about saving time and resources. It also improves data verifiability and reproducibility, and thus the reliability and transparency of scientific outputs, both empowering and democratizing science. Furthermore, the openness of research data increases the visibility and impact of research, speeds up the adoption of research findings and creation of innovations, and facilitates disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration, both within the scientific community and in the wider social circle.
Optimal use and reuse of archived data become possible only when data accessibility and citability are possible and ensured. Properly managed and openly published (meta)data with appropriate licenses enable and facilitate data reuse. The FAIR data principles, formulated by Force11, give guidance on how to make research data truly open and reusable.
The goal of Hanken’s guidelines on open and FAIR data is to make more of the research data produced at Hanken publicly available. For this purpose, a dataset can be made open, or the metadata of the dataset can be made openly available in a Finnish or international data finder. Research datasets are registered in Haris with the persistent identifiers (e.g., DOI and URN) for the (meta)data.
Hanken recommends researchers to use Fairdata Qvain metadata tool, offered by the Ministry of Education and Culture and maintained by CSC – IT Centre for Science, to describe and publish (meta)data. The Qvain metadata tool makes describing and publishing research data effortless for researchers and ensures that data are richly and systematically documented and properly managed in line with the FAIR data principles. The Fairdata services are integrated with the National Research Information Hub, and metadata published through Qvain are automatically transferred to and displayed on National Research Information Hub. Other Fairdata services for data storage and archival (IDA), dataset dissemination and retrieval (Etsin), as well as long-term digital preservation of research data (PAS) are all recommended. CSC is also releasing services for processing sensitive personal data.
Where necessary, researchers draw up a data management plan (DMP) at the planning stage of the research and update it as the research evolves. A DMP is a formal document that specifies how the research data are handled during and after a research project, and identifies the key actions to be taken to ensure that the research data are probably managed and made available as FAIR as possible. It describes the essential properties of the research data, measures for maintaining high ethical standards and complying with relevant legislations, data ownership and access rights, planned lifespan of the data, and a plan for publishing the data. Researchers can use Hanken’s DMP template or other Public DMP templates (with Hanken's DMP guidance integrated) in DMPTuuli to write and update a DMP. See DMPTuuli with Hanken's DMP guidance and DMP template in the LibGuide on Research data management (RDM).
For the secure storage and backup of active research data during usage, researchers are encouraged to use ITC and data storage services provided and maintained by Hanken, including the researchers’ own account on the Hanken network like H:\, Microsoft Office365 applications (e.g., Onedrive for Business), Webropol or SPSS, and/or services provided by CSC such as IDA which is also for data archival. Established and well-known infrastructures are mostly a more secure alternative for storing research data than, for example, the hard disc on the researcher’s personal computer, both in terms of data security and from a confidentiality perspective. The researcher can ask for advice from Hanken’s Data Protection Officer (DPO) to ensure that other storage and archive solutions meet requirements for data protection.
For archiving research data, Hanken uses external infrastructures that are maintained by CSC, the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) or international bodies, which can be easily linked to Hanken’s infrastructure systems.
Researchers choose the degree of openness of research data which may be restricted and vary for many reasons. When defining appropriate access rights (open, embargoed or restricted) to the research data, researchers should take into account the protection of personal information, trade secrets and other confidential data, and compliance with intellectual property agreements and funders’ requirements and publishers’ data policies.
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license is also recommended for published datasets when possible. The attribution terms of Creative Commons licenses ensure that creators of research data are credited.
Freedom of research applies at Hanken. It may be advisable to conclude agreements on data ownership, rights of use and other intellectual property rights (IPRs) before commencing research activities in a research group. Researchers can use Hanken’s template for the agreement on the ownership, data transfer obligation and governance of the research data when it is in their interests to do so. The researcher who created copyright-protected work is the holder of copyright.
When openly accessible archived datasets are reused, good practices for the attribution of authorship and data citation shall be followed.
Hanken guarantees sufficient resources for services related to data management, and offers guidance, training and support for drawing up data management plans (DMPs), data collection and organizing, data storage, backup and transferral, data sharing and preservation, and optimal use and reuse of archived data throughout the research process. Training and support are also provided for identifying and resolving ethical and legal issues involved in research data including data protection regulations, data-sharing agreements, data ownership, data rights transferal, open data licenses, secondary data usage copyright permissions and other intellectual property rights (IPRs) issues.
Pictures: SciELO in Perspective, Wikimedia Commons.
Researchers can use the research data management flowchart or follow the 6 stages outlined in Data management process at Hanken in the LibGuide on Research data management (RDM) to complete the data management process that covers the whole research data life cycle. Note that there are two different data management processes with different instructions for BSc/MSc/eMBA students and for researchers and PhD students, respectively.
Data management skills are understood as essential research competency. Appropriate data management and carefully organized and described research datasets that are published for data retrieval and reuse are recognised and considered as part of a researcher’s academic merits.
All research shall adhere to good data protection practices and ensure ethical and legal compliance. Follow the procedures specified in the Guidelines and procedures of personal data processing in studies and research at Hanken to maintain high ethical standards and observe relevant legislations.
For the open accessibility of research data, it is important to do the following:
Information on RDM is available in Hanken's LibGuide on Research data management (RDM) including:
Hanken's guidelines on open research methods
Hanken recommends that protocols, methods and software code are shared openly, even when implemented with proprietary tools, to guarantee the transparency and reproducibility of data collection and analysis process.
Hanken encourages researchers to explain, document, and share the protocols and methods used in the research so that they can be reused and further developed and that the research outputs can be easily reproducible. Researchers can use protocol and method repositories such as Open Science Framework and GitHub, and enter the link obtained from the repositories in Haris.
Instructions and advice are under development. Hanken is monitoring the developmental work at the national level. The national policy component on open research methods, including codes and software, is estimated to be completed in 2022.