Course syllabus

Course name: Introduction to Data Management Practices
Dates: 2025-04-01 to 2025-04-03
Location: SciLifeLab, Solna
Contact: edu.intro-dm@nbis.se

National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS) gives this course to introduce important aspects of Research Data Management through a series of lectures and hands-on computer exercises. The course, with an updated course syllabus, is intended for researchers who want to take the first steps towards a more systematic and reproducible approach to documenting, describing and managing research data.

Course content

Topics covered will include:

  • Open Science and FAIR in practice
  • Organising data, files and folders in research projects
  • Describing data with metadata
  • Documentation using Markdown
  • Publishing data to public data repositories
  • Cleaning tabular data and metadata with OpenRefine
  • Versioning data, documents and scripts (e.g. by using Git & GitHub)
  • Writing Data Management Plans

Note that the covered topics have been updated from previous course events.

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Describe some reasons for the principles of Open Science and FAIR
  • Organise their project files and folders in a structured way
  • Find and select relevant metadata standards for their research project
  • Find suitable public repositories for life science data and have an understanding of the requirements for submitting data to them
  • Clean up existing tabular data
  • Perform basic version control of files and have means to learn more advanced skills
  • Have an understanding of the benefits of data management plans (DMPs) and what a DMP should contain

Application instructions

National course open for PhD students, postdocs, researchers and other employees within all Swedish universities. We also welcome applications from outside of Sweden and from the non-academic sector; for more information, contact us.

The course is geared towards life scientists wanting to take the first steps towards a more systematic and reproducible approach to documenting, describing and managing research data. Due to limited space, the course can accommodate a maximum of 25 participants and will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.

Fee:

2000 SEK for participants from academic institutions
9500 SEK for participants from non-academic organisations

The fee is paid by invoice to NBIS and includes lunches, coffee and snacks and a course dinner and is paid by invoice to NBIS. Please note that NBIS cannot invoice individuals.

Entry requirements: No previous programming experience is required, but you are required to bring your own laptop with the required software pre-installed. Installation instructions will be provided before the course starts.

Application closes: 2025-03-04

Confirmation to accepted students: by 2025-03-11

Link to application: https://forms.gle/KZTc1m5LsJrnwAmF6