The management and sharing of research data is one of the essential dimensions of Open Science. Data are becoming increasingly central to modern research processes. Their management — enabling later verification and reuse — is a critical element for the quality and reliability of science.
Major funding agencies worldwide have been adopting policies and establishing requirements and procedures for data management and sharing. These policies and mandates are based not only on reducing costs associated with data collection (avoiding duplications), but also on aspects related to research reproducibility.
The University of Minho, which had already been working for over a decade in the field of Open Access to publications, established a working group in 2017 to conduct a study and provide recommendations for an institutional strategy on research data at UMinho. This group produced the report "Institutional Strategy for Research Data Management: Study and Recommendations", which included recommendations structured into five key areas: 1) Policy, 2) Infrastructure and data systems, 3) Services and tools to support data management, 4) Capacity building, and 5) Data protection and intellectual property legal issues.
In 2020, following the recommendation to provide an infrastructure of integrated systems and services for the UMinho community to manage data throughout the research lifecycle, DataRepositóriUM was created: a repository service for sharing, publishing, and managing research data.
