Research data may include:
In the context of University of Helsinki Data catalogue term “research data” includes all of these and many more:
The research data described in Data catalogue can be found using Data catalogue's own interface, and search engines. In addition, metadata records from Data catalogue are exported to other metadata services, such as Research.fi.
We recommend that you publish your research data in a suitable repository (read more at the FAQ for data preservation: Where can I publish my data?). If it is a repository from which we automatically import data into Data catalogue, your data will appear there during the next transfer. Just remember to enter the University of Helsinki as your affiliation (organisation information).
If the repository in question is not harvested in Data catalogue, or if the data cannot be published, for example due to its sensitivity or trade secrets, you can submit its metadata to Data catalogue using the form on the right.
Yes. You can also update the metadata later if necessary.
When describing the data, it is a good idea to try to divide the data into meaningful sets. What these are depends on the case, but data relating to a single research article or project, for example, often form a clear unit. A set of data can also be formed according to the type of data, for example, the data produced by a single measuring instrument over a certain period of time. The more precisely the different parts of a dataset are described, the greater their value is in terms of increased reuse and discoverability. Datasets such as "All data from our research team 2012-2015" are unlikely to be very useful, but if this is the only way to describe the data, it is obviously better than not describing the data at all.
Yes you can! When you describe your data in Data catalogue, you are also complying with the research funders' requirement to follow the FAIR principles.
Although the metadata do not include the data itself, please take care not to accidentally disclose sensitive information when describing the data. For example, if you have interviewed people from two universities whose location has been anonymised due to the sensitivity of the topic, the location must not be disclosed in the metadata either. In this case, it would be a good idea to refer to the universities in the same way as in the research article, e.g., Uni1 and Uni2. If you are wondering how to describe sensitive data, feel free to ask us for help!
Some of the metadata records entered in Data catalogue contain information on the faculty where the data was produced. You can find this information in the keyword field. By clicking on the name of the faculty, you will get a list of metadata records that also have the same faculty information. You can also search for dataset by faculty name using Data catalogue's search function.
Most research data repositories do not contain the faculty information. Most of Data catalogue's content is automatically imported from such data repositories. If Data catalogue had a filter for faculty, it would only be able to filter data from those metadata entries that have information about the faculty. The result would give only a small fraction of the data produced by the faculty and found in Data catalogue, thus misleading the user. Because of this, there is no filter for faculty in Data catalogue.
If you manually describe the research data in Data catalogue, you will get a DOI for the metadata, even if the dataset itself already has an existing DOI. The DOI assigned by Data catalogue refers to the metadata (in Data catalogue), not, for example, to the data published in a repository.
Let's start with the most common reason: did you put University of Helsinki as your affiliation (organisational information)? Since Zenodo has publications from a number of different universities, our data transfer relies on this information.
If the affiliation information is in order (and there are no typos!), try the following: did you save the data recently? We transfer data from Zenodo at certain frequencies. So wait a while. If the data still does not appear in the Data Catalogue, please send us an email (datasupport@helsinki.fi).
The problem may be due to the fact that the automatic harvesting of metadata, i.e. the data transfer from the repository, is not fully successful. Please let us know (datasupport@helsinki.fi) and we will correct the problem. Please indicate in your message which metadata record is in question.
Please email us at datasupport@helsinki.fi.
In principle, nothing is deleted from Data catalogue, as the aim is to keep the metadata of the research data as long as possible. However, metadata can be edited. If necessary, please contact Data Support (datasupport@helsinki.fi).
Yes you can! You can suggest it using the form on the right. We'll investigate every suggestion, but please note, that we might not be able to harvest your favorite repository — not all repositories' metadata standards match our technical requirements for metadata. For example, they might lack the affiliation information, thus we can’t separate data produced in the University of Helsinki from data produced elsewhere.
Currently, information from Data catalogue is not automatically transferred to Tuhat and you cannot add information there yourself. We are exploring the possibility of adding information of the produced data to Tuhat profile. We recommend adding information about published data to ORCID.