Research data management

Our eResearch capabilities

Our eResearch services mean you can store your data securely, ready to be cited and used for future research projects. We’ll help you get noticed for your work and collaborate on research opportunities around the world.

Our eResearch tools and services help researchers to develop and improve their research outcomes. How do we do this? By providing resources that:

offer large-scale data accessibility
convert raw data into meaningful information
promote research collaboration both here and abroad.

Data management

Our range of data management services make sure your data is organised, stored safely and easily accessible, well into the future.

Data management planning

Preparing a data management plan for your research project will save you both time and effort in the long run. It’ll help you make informed decisions early on in the project that’ll impact the type of work you need to do to get the best outcome.

A great tool to use is Research Data Footprints, which offers a step-by-step guide to developing data management plans.

Store your data

We recommend keeping at least three copies of your data (original, external/local and external/remote) and have a plan in place for regular backups.

Store your digital research data on Deakin-managed data repositories – that way, it’ll be secured and backed up safely.

Wherever possible, original, non-digital data should be stored in the school or institute where your research was carried out.

Preserve

By preserving your data, you’ll be helping to keep it accessible and usable in the future, no matter what changes in technology we experience.

Well-managed and long term data preservation saves time and money by avoiding replicating research. It also improves the quality of future research by offering new opportunities for existing data.

Sharing your data means increasing its value, as it can be accessed by others and cited. As well as that, sharing data:

contributes to building research partnerships - nationally and internationally
could be a requirement of your funding or of publishing your research
promotes new research, testing of new or alternative hypotheses and methods of analysis
helps to educate new researchers.

Describe

Describing your data will help others discover your work, share the data and raise your research profile. Other benefits include:

increased impact and recognition of your work
new opportunities for collaboration and exchange
future research to build on your data
reuse of your data by researchers in other fields for different purposes
better management of research data.

Tools for managing research data

Research Data Footprints

Create a data management plan and describe your data collections for archiving, discovery, and reuse or possible publication.

The Research Data Store

Create data storage space on Deakin infrastructure for your project. You can also publish data to the wider world with the RDS.

Data Management toolkit

Deakin’s library designed this toolkit to act as a checklist for ownership and rights relating to research data. It also offers guidelines on pulling together a data management plan.

Mantra data management training

This free online course has been developed by the University of Edinburgh's data centre, EDINA. It offers guidelines for working with digital data and managing research data.

Data management compliance

Your data must comply with external and internal policy requirements. All research carried out at Deakin is subject to the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (the Code), as well as Deakin’s own Research Conduct Policy.

Both documents give researchers clear information about their responsibilities for the short and long term management of their research data and records.

Membership with the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

Deakin’s membership with the NCI (Australia’s national research computing facility) means our researchers can access its world-class services.

NCI offers highly-integrated supercomputer and file systems, Australia’s highest performance research cloud, and one of the nation’s largest data catalogues. All of this helps researchers power through with computation and data-intensive research.