- Researchers can follow the RDM flowchart below to complete different RDM tasks:

- Or you can follow the following six data management stages in your research planning, active research and results sharing phases:
(1) Before data collection (during research planning phase)
Stage 1. Write and update continuously a Data management plan (DMP).
- A DMP is an important part of RDM and an essential tool for following good research practices. It specifies what and how the research data will be handled for your research project and identifies the key actions for ethical and legal compliance and FAIR data production before, during, and after your research project. More and more research funders require a written DMP, even several versions at different stages of your research.
- You can use Hanken's DMP template or other Public DMP templates (with Hanken's DMP guidance integrated) in DMPTuuli to help you write and update a DMP. See Hanken's DMP template and DMP guidance in DMPTuuli.
Stage 2. Identify ethics and data protection issues in your research proposal.
- Follow all the relevant Ethical principles and guidelines and any applicable ethical review practices.
- Check the six study types described in Ethical review to see if you need to request an ethical review statement by Hanken’s Research Ethics Committee before starting your research project.
(2) Data collection and analysis (during active research phase)
Stage 3. When collecting personal data, you need to:
- Obtain informed consent from the research participants, which is required by research ethics, for example, TENK's guidelines.
- Use the Informed consent template (in English, in Finnish, in Swedish) to obtain informed consent. Choose the language that your research participants prefer.
- Provide all the mandated information in a privacy notice to the research participants about the processing of their personal data.
- Fill in and submit the e-form The Research's Privacy Notice (in English, in Finnish, in Swedish) and provide the Privacy notice to your research participants to fulfil the transparency requirement and information provision obligation (GDPR, Art. 12-14).
- After submitting the e-form, click "Save the completed form as a file." Edit the downloaded RTF file, so it can be suitable for your research participants.
- After submission, this Privacy notice e-form also functions as the Record of processing activities which fulfils the record-keeping accountability (GDPR, Art. 30).
Stage 4. Store, back up and transfer data securely, and organize your data during research.
(3) After data collection (sharing results)
Stage 5. Publish (meta)data in line with the FAIR data principles. See Data publishing and preservation.
- It is strongly recommended to use Fairdata Qvain metadata tool to describe and publish the metadata of your research data. Qvain is part of the Fairdata services offered by the Ministry of Education and Culture and maintained by CSC. See Metadata and data documentation.
- Note that even if you cannot publish and archive your research data, because, e.g., your data contain personal information, sensitive personal data or confidential data, you can still publish the metadata of your data.
- Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license is recommended for published (meta)data when possible.
- Research data are archived and opened in a national or international repository when possible.
- Recommended general repositories include:
- Zenodo by the OpenAIRE project and CERN.
- IDA, part of the Fairdata services by the Ministry and CSC,
- Aila by the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD), and
- Define an appropriate access type (open, embargoed or restricted) to research data based on the feature of the data, your research process, need for the protection of trade secrets and other confidential data, and intellectual property agreements, as well as funders’ and publishers’ requirements.
- Data with personal information can only be opened anonymized.
- If your data has long-term value, consider preserving your data in Fairdata-PAS maintained by the Ministry and CSC.
Stage 6. Register your dataset in Haris and add the persistent identifiers (e.g., DOI and URN) you have obtained from Qvain and/or the data repository for your (meta)data. Please see Register your datasets.