After Publication of Each Study – Anonymization & Store on Dataverse

Dataverse is a platform for safely storing data sets that accompany your publications. Although the one of the goals of Dataverse is to offer a platform for sharing data sets, SHE regards Dataverse foremost as a data preserving platform. Since Dataverse does not allow the storage of data with personal information, we only store anonymized data sets in Dataverse.

For all studies yielded from a research project the anonymized data sets need to be stored at www.dataverse.nl (the Dutch branch of Dataverse). Storage on Dataverse is taken care of by the SHE data-manager, to be contacted via shedata@maastrichtuniversity.nl.

The data manager will instruct you how to prepare the data. In general, you need prepare the data in excel, word, pdf, .sav, csv or other common formats. For a qualitative study you can also include coding schemes, journal books, Atlas-TI files and so on, as long as these are all anonymous.

Next you need to create a data description file per study in which you include (If available):

• Your ORCID id
• Title of the study, number of the study in your PhD project
• Keywords
• Reference to the publication(s)
• A short description of the study set-up
• Explanation of all the instruments used in the data collection (including phrasing of items in surveys)
• Explanation of the data files: what data is stored in what file?
• In case of quantitative data: meaning and ranges or codings of all columns
• In case of qualitative data: description of the structure of the data files

See SHE Dataverse for examples of data descriptions.

Please create a subfolder “Dataverse” on your P-drive to prepare these files. When uploading the data to Dataverse, we will only make the data description file available for download by others. The anonymized data files can only be downloaded after requesting permission with the SHE data manager. This permission will only be given if the researcher (or the supervisor) agrees.

After completion of a PhD Project

Data on Surfdrive is removed automatically of the account from a PhD student is ended. Supervisors that store data for their supervisees should remove this data from Surfdrive after ensuring that everything is stored in the appropriate folder on P:. No other copies of the data sets should exist at that point of time. 10 years after the PhD project ended, the data and all other documents will be removed from the P: drive, except for a copy of the anonymized data as uploaded to dataverse.nl.

The anonymized data on dataverse.nl will probably remain there or will be transferred to a platform for longtime storage, such as Dans from KNAW.