The R workshops and the R café

Utrecht University organises regular workshops to teach R basics: data handling and visualisation, and making research reproducible with R and R Markdown. The R Café has a more informal set-up, where researchers with R programming skills can meet and learn from each other, or from prepared exercises.

Data Cleaning with Open Refine for Ecologists

Data Carpentry has developed this course of data pre-processing with Open Refine, an open tool to work with data. The course covers several topics such as error correction and data formatting and harmonization.

Data repository finder

Utrecht University has created a simple decision-tree tool that helps researchers to choose a generic repository that best fits their needs. To do so, criteria such as restriction of access and cost of the repository are taken into account.

Five steps to decide what to keep

The Digital Curation Centre has prepared a tool to guide researchers in their preservation strategy. Through a series of checklist, researchers are guided to reflect on what purposes the data could serve in the future, to consider what requirements they need to fulfill and what should be preserved according to the data reuse potential and its replicability. Finally, the costs of the preservation are considered to make a final decision.

Publishing and sharing sensitive data: guidelines and decision tree

ANDS has published a comprehensive guide about best practice for the publication and sharing of research data (in the Australian context). The guide helps researchers with the publishing phase of senstitive data with a step-by-step approach which covers several phases of the research data lifecycle. These steps are summarized in a decision tree.

Encryption guidelines

Ghent University has elaborated an encryption manual for researchers. It begins with basic information about what encryption is and when is it needed. Then, it describes different encryption strategies and frames them into different scenarios, and provides step by step instructions for each of these scenarios.

Metadata tutorial

The University of North Caroline has developed a step-wise tutorial about metadata. It addresses what metadata is and why is it needed, explains the basic elements of metadata and how these are represemted in standards, as well as how controlled vocabularies are related to metadata. It finally provides a list of best practices resources for metadata.

Making a research project understandable - Guide for data documentation

The University of Helsinki created, upon request, a compact guide for researchers to help with research data documentation. It first introduces the basic elements of documentation, and then provides practical instructions and strategies to proceed with documentation during the research project, but also for the publishing phase.

LEGO® Metadata for Reproducibility

The University of Glasgow has designed a LEGO® based game for 4-24 players to teach about metadata and reproducibility. In their own words: "The game addresses issues including planning for metadata, formats of metadata recording, standards and automation. The game also draws multiple parallels between recording and communicating the research process and documenting and the creation of a LEGO® model. The process of playing the game draws researchers into discussions on how metadata is captured, recorded and disseminated, which in turn provides an opportunity for signposting to further resources in this area."

Version control tools & techniques handout

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a series of file organization handouts. The handout for version control briefly summarise different techniques for version control and provides an overview of the main differences between automatic change log platforms and tools.

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