Stamp – Standardized Data Management Plan for Educational Research in the Research Data Management Organiser

The Stamp – Standardized Data Management Plan for Educational Research, offered by KonsortSWD, is a unique tool for FAIR research data management (RDM). Based on seven standards for FAIR RDM, the Stamp supports researchers and data managers, e.g. in the form of checklists and embedded further assistance, in the planning and implementation of their RDM from project planning to beyond the end of the project. The Stamp (version 1.0) is currently available as a pdf version for download from the Verbund Forschungsdaten Bildung (VerbundFDB), the German Network of Educational Research Data, website.

In addition, the Stamp editorial group is working on the implementation of individual parts of the Stamp in the Research Data Management Organiser (RDMO), such as the guide. The guide uses nine questions about the project and the data to be managed to introduce users to RDM and support them in their further planning. The guide provides users with an overview of the standards relevant to their data as well as information on the RDM activities required to fulfill the respective standard.

For example, the guide asks about the processing of personal data in the project. If this applies to a specific project, a) the data protection principles must be taken into account, b) there must be a legal basis for processing the data and c) the data must be processed in accordance with the law during the course of the project (and beyond), as described in the data protection checklists. If, on the other hand, no personal data is processed in a project, data protection aspects do not need to be considered further in the RDM and corresponding activities, i.e. associated data protection checklists, do not apply.

The RDMO instance of the Stamp also enables the creation of a data management plan (DMP) for project applications. In RDMO, users are asked to provide various details about their project, such as the title or person responsible for the DMP, as well as individual standards, e.g. on the processing of personal data in the project or on any risks of the project for different groups of people.

The DMP template itself is based on the seven standards for a FAIR RDM. These are supplemented by project-specific information, such as possible risks of the project for different groups of people or the legal basis for processing personal data, e.g. in the form of informed consent. As a result, users of the DMP template in RDMO receive a continuous text that can be exported from RDMO and further processed locally, e.g. in Open Office, Microsoft Office, as HTML, Markdown or in LaTex.

By implementing individual parts of the Stamp in RDMO, the Stamp Editorial Group further simplifies the usability of the Stamp. The RDMO instance now also provides Stamp users with an online version for planning and implementing their RDM that is not only easy to edit, but can also be reused in other projects. The Stamp editorial group is thus continuing its efforts to create a high-quality and systematic RDM for generating reusable data in accordance with the FAIR Data principles.