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Data Horror Week: Data doomed to death  

Published on 27.10.2021
Tampere Universities
Doomed for destruction
Our research team was so nice and productive. We collected rich and diverse research data… there were interviews, there were focus groups, there were surveys and there were photos taken by ourselves. We put so much time and effort for data collection, you can’t even imagine that. Then the project was over, and it occurred to us that we could deposit the data for further use.

Our data seemed to be suitable for the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD). We contacted FSD and they started to ask tricky questions such as: did you ask the research participants a permission for data archiving and did you mention archiving in the privacy notice? We were confused: WHAT are they talking about? We had missed all that because we were in such a hurry to get started with the field work. Consequently, we lost the opportunity to open the data to others and even to use the data in our own future projects. Or well, it would reportedly still work if we just contacted the research participants, but easier said than done. Damn it, we could have written so many more articles based on that data. Now, the open science policy of our university community is not being implemented properly, sorry for that.   

Data Horror Week 25.-29.10.2021. Stories published during the week are fictional. Read all the horror stories on the Research Data Services website.  

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