Planning

A good plan can lead to considerable savings. First assess whether you can reuse existing data. Many data sets are freely accessible through data repositories. Do you want to purchase a licence for commercial data? Please contact RDM Support.

If you are going to collect new data, think about the level on which you intend to collect it. Collecting data per hour instead of per second will likely suffice for a daily average. This could lead to savings in potential storage costs.

You can reduce the costs of organising your data by designing templates for data entry before the start of the research project.

Remember to design informed consent forms to get consent for collecting, processing, and (anonymously) publishing personal data. Having to get in touch with research participants afterwards can lead to substantial expenses.

Make sure to account for the costs and/or time that come with trainings, meetings, renting spaces and/or personnel. If you end up working with one or more partners, additional travel and food expenses could be included.

When working with other parties it is important to first assess who holds the copyright. The UvA and AUAS Copyright Information Sites can assist you in these matters. Do you need legal assistance? Please contact RDM Support.

Several financers allow you to declare potential RDM expenses that you incur during as well as after your project. You will have to submit an overview of these costs during your application process.

Storage

UvA and AUAS researchers can store their data in Research Drive and in SURFdrive. If you have large quantities of data your data steward can offer advice on the different storage opportunities.

Describe during your research your data, how you collected them, and how they were processed. This will ensure that information does not get lost, it will help you save time at the end of your project, and it makes sure that your data are reusable for both yourself and others.

Cleaning up your data, by for example correcting all the typos in your data set, can end up taking a lot of time. If you regularly clean up your data during your research rather than leaving it to the end you can save time that can be costly.

Having your data transcribed by an external service can save a lot of time, while accounting for that time in your research plan will be cheaper. Furthermore, think about whether you need the data fully or partially transcribed, whether the transcripts need to be translated, and whether you require additional hardware/software.

There are several ways to anonymise data. It is expensive to edit audio-visual data and it can limit the data’s usability. A transcript will be easier and cheaper to anonymise, especially if you anonymise it during transcribing.

Digitalising data is relatively cheap if you use scans. Manually entering and checking the data is more expensive.

Sharing

You can allow others to access your data through Projects in UvA/AUAS figshare, SURFdrive, or with SURFfilesender. Do you want to encrypt your data first? Use VeraCrypt or 7-zip, both can be found in the UvA and AUAS software catalogue.

You can publish your data via UvA/AUAS figshare. If you decide to use an external data archive, it can charge you a one-time or annual fee.

An external data archive can require that you convert your data to a particular file format. Purchasing the necessary software to convert your data can lead to further expenses.