How does the Research Documentation Centre manage research data?

The Research Documentation Centre documents, archives and makes the researches conducted by Centre for Social Sciences (Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence) accessible for re-use. A staff member of the Research Documentation Centre informs the researcher of the circumstances and possibilities of archiving. On the basis of this, considering the legal framework and the requirements of research participants, the researcher determines how to archive the specific collection. This is then specified in the deposit form. There are alternative ways to access the collection and individual files in the collection of the digital repository of the Research Documentation Centre. There are open access data, data accessible only for researchers of Centre for Social Sciences and some data require the specific permission of the researcher.

Upon receiving the a data collection, the Research Documentation Centre prepares it for archiving in agreement with the help of the researcher. We clean the quantitative databases, unify and format the qualitative data and texts. We anonymize the data, namely we remove personally identifiable information from data sets, if necessary.

We put the cleaned and arranged data into a folder and upload it to the http://openarchive.tk.mta.hu repository. Metadata needed for archiving are also collected, under the guidance of the researcher, if necessary. Researchers have opportunity to do the uploading and metadata encoding themselves, in this case the Research Documentation Centre staff controls the process. It is possible to upload a publication to the repository system of the Research Documentation Centre and to link the data and the publication directly.