GESIS publishes “Guidelines for the Management of Research Data – Social Sciences Survey Data”

GESIS – the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences has just released the technical report “Guidelines for the management of research data –  social sciences survey data.”

The report is available in German only, but the eighty pages thick document covers a lot of important topics:

Starting with some general recommendations for the exploration of the data available at an institution and issues of privacy protection and responsibility for research data, the report also provides a useful checklist for the management of research data in the first chapter.
Other chapters deal with organisational and technical aspects of data preparation and documentation (chapter 2) or organisational and technical issues of safeguarding data and documents (chapter 3).

Chapter 4 discusses metadata standards, focussing on DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) and persistent identificators (DOI -> da|ra, DataCite). Chapter 5 covers perpetual access to research data and some legal questions. The report concludes with an overview of the services GESIS provides for the management of research data, e.g. digital long-term preservation.