Create & Receive

Generic RDM

Specific RDM

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Data Reception

There are various ways through which research data can reach your insititution. For example, you may receive the data and associated materials:

through a collaborative workspace (e.g. Sciebo or Open Science Framework)
via postal mail (CD, USB drive, external hard drive)
through a digital tool that you provide to your data-submitting institutions
by taking over from other data archives or repositories

You can also find some helpful information in the Data Acquisition article.

Frequently, research data reaches you in an unstructured manner or without accompanying metadata, which increases your documentation effort. To enhance both the quality of data submission and to reduce the workload for you and your data providers, it’s advisable to equip your data providers with data documentation tools. With the help of such tools, research projects can be documented from the outset. These documentations can then ideally be submitted as files along with the research data.

However, even for you as a data curator, it’s recommended to create standardized and machine-readable metadata for your data documentation, which can be read by other repositories or search engines. This significantly improves the findability, interoperability, and reusability of resources, helping you fulfill a significant portion of the FAIR principles.

You might already have specific metadata entry forms at your research data center, which facilitate standardized annotation of corresponding data. These forms could resemble, for instance, the DataCite Metadata Generator. You can find a helpful informational video on this in the Tips & Checklists section.