Research data

Experimental research in the sciences and social sciences produces large quantities of data. Research data management (RDM) is an emerging discipline that seeks best practices in handling this. Traditionally the data was kept by researchers and only final research outputs, such as papers analysing the data, would be published. Open science holds that the data should be published, both to increase verifiability of the work and to enable it to be used in other research. The full spirit of open science collaboration demands data publication early in the project, but research culture will need to change appreciably before this becomes widespread.