Adapt your DMP: part 5

DMPactivities

This is the fifth of seven 'Adapt your DMP' sections in this tour guide.

After working on this chapter, you should be able to define your strategy in protecting the rights of your participants whilst making your data available for as full and effective use as possible for the scientific community and the public. Filling in this part of your DMP will show how you are taking legal and ethical factors into consideration and it can actually help you navigate ethical review (self-assessment or formal).

To adapt your DMP, consider the following elements and corresponding questions:

  • Are you collecting personal data or do your data in any other way require special protection?
  • How is (sensitive) personal data protected during the project? (also see 'Storing your data')
  • Does your project require approval by a local ethics committee?
  • If so, how are your preparing for this review?
  • How will possible ethical issues be taken into account, and codes of conduct followed?
  • Do you require informed consent for your project? If so, how will permission be obtained?
  • Are you gaining written consent from respondents to share data beyond your research?
  • Did you discuss data archiving and sharing with the respondents from whom you collected the data?
  • Are you adequately documenting your consent to comply with the GDPR?
  • How are consent files organized and stored?
  • How are you going to protect the privacy of your participants?
  • Are you complying with data protection legislation?
  • Do you need to anonymise data, for example, to remove identifying information or personal data, during research or in preparation for sharing?
  • Are there IPR or copyright issues to consider?
  • Have you established who owns the copyright in your data? Might there be joint copyright?
  • Will permission be needed to collect/reuse the data?
  • Will these rights be transferred to another organisation for data archiving?

For easy reference, we have put together a list of DMP-questions for all chapters in this tour guide. You can view and download the checklist as pdf (CESSDA, 2018a) or editable form (CESSDA, 2018b), and keep them as a reference while you are studying the contents of this guide.