Intoduction to the Research Data Management Policy of ENTEG

The scope of the Research Data Management (RDM) policy is to guide the ENTEG researchers through the steps they need to take before, during and after the completion of research projects and their responsibilities. The research institute will maintain the Institute's RDM plan in accordance with the principles formulated in the regulations and policy of the University of Groningen and the Netherlands code of conduct for research integrity , and will make this data management plan available to its researchers. The plan contains the following elements:

• Data description and collection or re-use of existing data and software (code/script etc.);
• Documentation and data quality;
• Research software management;
• Storage and backup during the research process;
• Legal and ethical requirements, codes of conduct;
• Data sharing and long-term preservation;
• Data management responsibilities and resources

ENTEG scientists who lead a research group or are part of one, including postdoctoral fellows, PhD and MSc students, who contribute to ENTEG’s research output in the form of published articles, PhD and MSc theses, book, data, code, algorithms, scripts, data repositories, conference talks and posters are expected to comply with the requirements of this policy. The guidelines and regulations of this policy may be subject to change since many aspects of research data management are still being developed.

ENTEG is a multidisciplinary research institute with 10 research groups. The focus of these research groups cover a wide range of fields from robotics to material science, to chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biochemistry and to mathematics. As a consequence of this multidisciplinary nature, the research is also conducted in various ways such as experiments, simulations and observations where researchers need to collect and generate their research data in various formats and have to go through various steps to process and analyze their experimental, simulation or observation results.

Given the ever increasing complexity of digitized research and number of PhD students and Postdoctoral fellows, it is necessary that ENTEG follows the highest standards to ensure scientific integrity. Therefore, it is essential that the members of ENTEG become aware of a professional research data management framework. This means complying with the minimum requirements that enable secure storing, archiving, collaboration and sharing of the research data such that it is accessible and findable at any time by anyone in order to reproduce and verify the research output.