New RDM Guidance from the Portage COVID-19 Working Group

 September 30, 2020

The Portage Network is very pleased to announce the publication of five new guidance documents from the Portage COVID-19 Working Group. These guidance documents were developed to help support research data management in accordance with the RDA COVID-19 Guidelines and Recommendations. 

• Guide to COVID-19 Rapid Response Data Sharing and Deposit for Canadian Researchers
  This guidance is for researchers who need to prepare data for deposit in accordance with the Joint statement on sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (nCoV) outbreak.
• Can I Share My Data?
  This decision tree is designed to help alert researchers to situations where human participant data would need to be anonymized or de-identified before being deposited into a repository. It relies heavily on the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans – TCPS 2 (2018) which addresses consent and secondary use of information for research purposes.
• De-identification Guidance
  This guidance is intended to help researchers minimize disclosure risk when sharing data collected from human participants.
• Documentation and Supporting Material Required for Deposit
  A brief guide outlining key materials for depositing data in a repository.
• Recommended Repositories for COVID-19 Research Data
  This document is designed to help researchers select a repository that will provide immediate and long-term access to their COVID-19 data.

Portage will be hosting a community call to discuss how these new resources can help researchers, librarians, and others better manage COVID-19 related research data. More information, including date and registration, will be announced shortly.

The Portage COVID-19 Working Group was initiated in late March 2020 to create guidance for Canadian researchers who are generating or working with COVID-19 related data, and for librarians and others who support them. Membership in the Group spanned institutions from across Canada, and was led by Portage Curation Coordinator Erin Clary, Preservation Coordinator Beth Knazook, and former Training Coordinator Melanie Parlette-Stewart.

In addition to the publications above, the Group also collaborated with the broader data management community to gather Canadian COVID-19 related resources — including sources of data or statistics on COVID-19 and RDM-related resources and links — for inclusion in the international  OpenAIRE COVID-19 Gateway. 

For more information about the Portage COVID-19 Working Group or its initiatives, please contact erin.clary@carl-abrc.ca.