Agile-RDM: Establishing an agile and needs-oriented research data management strategy in psychology

• Applicants: Dr. Katarina Blask; Professor Dr. Mario Gollwitzer; Professor Dr. Felix Schönbrodt
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Developmental and Educational Psychology ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 535950381

Transparency and openness in the research process are becoming increasingly important in all scientific fields - including psychology. Accordingly, researchers should not only make research results freely available, for example in the form of scientific articles (open access), but also provide research data, analysis scripts and study materials that are relevant for the replicability of the findings. However, the reusability of the data made available requires the most uniform, efficient and comprehensive research data management (RDM) possible on the part of the data providers: Research data should not only be findable (Findable) and accessible (Accessible), but also usable (Interoperable and Reusable) (cf. the "FAIR" principles). Despite a variety of training measures, the effort required to prepare data for sharing is often still perceived as very high, as it is often very difficult to translate and integrate the acquired knowledge into concrete workflows. In our view, this is because existing strategies to promote RDM skills are often too generic to address the specific needs of individual researchers. Furthermore, little effort is made to ensure the sustainability of the acquired skills or to resort to didactic-methodological approaches that enable an easy transfer of the acquired knowledge into the researchers' workflows. With the project "Agile-RDM: Establishing an agile and needs-oriented research data management strategy in psychology", we aim to develop such a strategy for psychology and establish it in the discipline. To this end, three strategic goals are pursued: 1) The development of an agile and needs-oriented RDM certificate course for researchers in psychology; 2) an empirical evaluation of the agile certificate course to assess its suitability for the effective and efficient teaching of RDM competencies; 3) the development and evaluation of a concept for project-related incentive structures that will ensure the implementation of the RDM practices learned in the certificate course in research projects in the long term.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)