The website is divided into the sections “Before”, “During” and “After Research”, followed by a description of MPDL services to support researchers. However, for data management purposes, these phases of the research process are not necessarily separate from each other. Some aspects should be considered at an early stage but require attention throughout the whole project. This is especially the case for open research data.
Before Research: Early planning can save time at later stages of the research process. Research funders increasingly require data management plans. Other subchapters of this section deal with legal-ethical aspects (how to manage personal research data), file handling (file nomenclature, organization, and versioning) and file formats (sustainable ones are recommended).
During Research: The primary data management task during this phase is to store data safely with regular backups. Beyond storage, MPDL services also support data acquisition and collaborative working during scientific projects.
After Research: Data matter beyond the lifetime of a scientific research project. Funding organizations generally require that data are kept for ten years. Publishers often require open sharing of data, which are related to scientific publications. This section includes chapters about data repositories and licences recommended for scientific data.
MPDL Services: MPDL research data management services support researchers in managing data acquisition (labfolder, LabCam), data storage (Keeper), and collaborative working («collective») as well as open data sharing (Edmond, DOI Service) and long-term archival (Keeper).