Course name: Introduction to Data Management Practices
Contact: edu.intro-dm@nbis.se

This course will introduce important aspects of Research Data Management through a series of lectures and hands-on computer exercises. The course is intended for researchers that want to take the first steps towards a more systematic and reproducible approach to analysing 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
Publishing data to public data repositories
Cleaning tabular data and metadata with OpenRefine
Writing basic recipes for data analysis and visualisation with R
Versioning data, documents and scripts
Writing Data Management Plans

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 metadata in a structured way
Find, and select, relevant metadata standards for their research project
Find suitable public repositories for their data, and have an understanding of how to do submit them
Clean up existing tabular data
Perform basic version control of files, and have means to learn more advanced skills
Perform basic data analysis and visualisations in R, and have means to learn more advanced skills
Have an understanding of the benefits of DMPs, and what a DMP should contain

Application instructions

National course open for PhD students, postdocs, researchers and other employees within all Swedish universities. The course is geared towards life scientists wanting to take the first steps towards a more systematic and reproducible approach to analysing and managing research data.

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.

Fee

We charge a fee for onsite course occasions, to be paid by invoice to NBIS. This includes lunches, coffee and snacks. Please note that NBIS cannot invoice individuals.

Registration

See Upcoming courses below.

Upcoming courses

17-19 October, Uppsala and Göteborg
spring 2024, Stockholm (preliminary)

Previous courses

18-20 April, 2023, Uppsala
11 - 13 October, 2022
5 - 7 April, 2022
12 - 14 October, 2021
4 - 6 April, 2021

Teaching materials

The course content is available as Carpentry style modules on Github.

Links to course modules and repositories
Module site	Repository
Open Science and FAIR	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-open-science-dm-practices
Data organisation practices	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-organising-data-dm-practices
Metadata	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-metadata-dm-practices
Data publication	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-data-publication-dm-practices
Cleaning tabular data with OpenRefine	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-openrefine-dm-practices
Introduction to scripted analysis with R	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-r-intro-dm-practices
Versioning of Data and Code using Git	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-versioning-dm-practices
Data Management Plans	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-dmp-dm-practices