For researchers and scientific institutions the significance of digital research data as well as their storage and publication increases permanently. Using IT-based technologies improves the generation, processing and distribution of data in the context of research projects significantly. With regard to the long-term availability and accessibility of research data the need for research data management is becoming ever clearer. The archiving, publication and therefore increased reusability of research data contribute significantly to the research activities and lead to a greater acceptance and an increase in the reputations for researchers.

To date, there is no explicit requirement for doctoral students at German universities to archive the research data generated during their doctoral project or to publish them as part of their dissertation. However, the principles of good scientific practice also apply to them, as the dissertations are explicitly an independent scientific achievement of doctoral students. Therefore research data of doctoral projects should be archived and linked to the corresponding dissertation to enable the verification and traceability of the results. Considering that doctoral students often leave the university or even the academic world after completing the doctoral examination procedure, it becomes clear that research data access and availability needs to be secured directly related to the submission of the dissertation.

Overmore services are required to support a professional research data management for doctoral students. On the one hand there should be technical support, e.g. software tools for the administration, description and storage and their integration into the technical environment of the university. On the other hand advisory services have to be implemented, e.g. on metadata schemes and legal issues.

The presentation for the ETD 2016 will cover an introduction to the objectives of the project that is funded by the German Research Foundation. It will furthermore focus on the work package “Requirement analysis and implementation concept” determining requirements of doctoral students on archiving and publication of their dissertations and research data. To get a large sample of doctoral students, we are working together with the Humboldt Graduate School, which currently manages approximately 1,100 doctoral candidates from different disciplines.

On the basis of concrete dissertation projects we will document the requirements as well as technical and legal issues concerning the long term preservation and publication of dissertation's texts and associated research data. It includes, e.g., the selection and definition of relevant research data sets and corresponding records in different levels of aggregation (raw, primary, secondary data), data types or versions.

On the author:

Niels Fromm studied computer science at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. From 2006 to 2012 he was working at the computing centre of the Humboldt University in the working group Electronic Publishing as a systems administrator. Since 2012 Niels Fromm is the Head of the working group Eletronic Publishing and works at the University Library.