The publication of research data at GESIS must be prepared by data depositor. Legal, organizational and technical points need to be clarified. Data depositor must hold rights to the data, these must be sufficiently documented and should be available in secure formats.
As the creator of data and documents, you have rights to your research results. When archiving the results, so-called 'simple rights of use' are transferred to the data archive via a contract. The simple rights of use include, among other things, the right to pass on data and documents to third parties or the right to change the formats of digital objects (files, tables, etc.) for the purposes of long-term backup. For the transfer of rights of use, the question of authorship should be clarified. For example, no digitized books or third-party scientific publications may be archived.
The contractual basis of a data offer can be found here.
When data collected from individuals are to be archived, data protection issues often need to be addressed. Regularly, data collection is based on the informed consent of the subjects (informed consent). However, there may be other legal conditions such as specific laws or contracts.
Questions for data depositors include the following:
When processing research data for archiving, the following is important:
(*) The concept of 'anonymization' has been revised with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of May 25, 2018 and the subsequently revised federal and state data protection acts. Legal bases are special, but not exclusive, Article 89 para.1 of the GDPR and Section 27 para. 3 sentence 1 Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG). In the context of the Federal Republic of Germany, GESIS assumes de facto anonymization of data before archiving. This means that a reference to a person can only be restored with disproportionate effort. GESIS thus follows the position of the German Data Forum (RatSWD) of July 16, 2018.
The data depositor compiles a Submission Information Package (SIP), which should include the following components:
Materials in PDF format must be free of protection mechanisms, otherwise they cannot be edited, e.g. migrated to newer file formats.
With regard to the long-term preservation of interpretability and usability of the data, the choice of suitable file formats is particularly important. Just like hardware, software is subject to a constant development process. For example, programs are equipped with new functionality or adapted for new operating systems, which in both cases can be accompanied by a corresponding change in the file format. All digital data is thus permanently threatened by changes in the hardware and software environment. These risks can be reduced by choosing suitable formats, among other things.
In principle, data sets should be transferred in such a way that they can be used with one of the widely used statistical packages (SPSS, Stata or R). There are various possibilities for this:
Data type | Preferred formats |
Data (statistics formats) |
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Documentation (texts) |
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Images |
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Data type | Accepted formats |
Data (statistics formats) |
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Documentation (texts) |
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Images |
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