Teaching Research Data Management Skills to Students

A responsible research data management is an essential part of good scientific practice and provides a solid foundation for excellent research. While training of data management skills for researchers has been established in many universities, integration into the teaching of students is still in its infancy, and seminars for students are rare. At Bielefeld University we have been offering an interdisciplinary seminar on research data management since 2013, which presents an introduction into the motivation, challenges and solutions of managing research data. In addition, research data management has been instituted as a module in our master’s programs in computer science.
Research data management as a topic in teaching is rather new, so there is only little experience on how to teach it, what topic should be covered and how to integrate it into the overall curriculum. Our seminar consists of 12 sessions, in which students acquire an overview of the motivation, challenges and solutions of managing research data. The skills that we identified as necessary for reliable data management include: documentation and metadata, publishing, finding and re-using data, data archiving and backup, legal questions of copyright and privacy protection. Special focus is put on hands-on training in tools, including digital version control systems, backup software, wikis, and electronic lab notebooks. The seminar also gives a practical overview of the university’s infrastructure for data management, namely the institutional repository PUB (http://pub.uni-bielefeld.de), a collaborative project management platform and a data management plan tool. To complete the seminar, students write a data management plan about a topic of their choice, e.g. a current project or their bachelor thesis.
We will present the topics we consider vital for teaching data management and report about our experiences in teaching them. We propose to start an interdisciplinary exchange about best approaches to teaching data management, with the goal to develop a shared curriculum of topics and create a body of teaching materials that can be made available under an open license.