Just pain, no gain? : Data management systems and biodiversity data

Scientists often see research data management as a burden. At first glance, it appears as yet another task with lots of effort and no apparent benefits. In fact, proper research data management provides many benefits and is important for biodiversity research projects. It is a key factor for their success and for the long-term impact of the research. Data management systems provide established informatics standards such as online access, versioning, and backup. Other features support scientists to organize, document, and verify their data according to accuracy and validity. Such system offers functionalities for data search, access control and traceability. This allows a collaborative, all-time available and trustable teamwork. Beside it, more and more funding agencies and publishers ask for accessible and reproducible data with a guarantee of long-term availability. In addition, stakeholders and the community request data access. Data management system curated data is ready to be published and cited. We believe that, in order to truly support researchers and ensure that they can reap the benefits of their efforts, data management platforms are needed that deal with the entire data lifecycle. We have developed the data management system “Biodiversity Exploratories Information System”. It acts as a platform to support researchers of the Priority Program “Biodiversity Exploratories” of the German Science Foundation (DFG). It guaranties data curation and enables data interchange and reuse since nearly 10 years. The system is also the foundation of the BEXIS2 data management platform. With our poster, we show the role of a data management system as a service to researchers and projects. We illustrate the benefits of such a system inside the whole life cycle of data seen from researcher and project perspective.