Tool Box

The LUIS offers a wide range of services and infrastructures suitable for storing, generating or editing data, as well as for collaboration.

Namely, the category "storage systems" contains multiple services relevant for RDM purposes.

The LUIS offers licences for numerous software tools or provide support in obtaining them. If you need special software, please check first whether it can be obtained through the LUIS.

At www.forschungsdaten.info/praxis-kompakt/tools you will find an extensive list of programmes and online services that support you with various data processing and project planning tasks.

The Society for Scientific Data Processing Göttingen(GWDG) operates the "Academic Cloud Niedersachsen" on behalf of the state of Lower Saxony. It bundles numerous services that are available free of charge to all members of public research institutions in Lower Saxony. Login is possible via the "federated login" with the access data of the respective institution, for example also with the LUH ID.

The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) is organised into 26 discipline-specific consortia, which develop and operate a wide range of services for their respective academic communities. These are complemented by interdisciplinary basic services.

RDMO is an open source tool developed in Germany that can also be installed locally on individual computers. In most cases, however, it makes more sense to create a free user account for one of the public instances listed here and use it. These differ primarily in the questionnaires or catalogues provided, which are partly generic and partly subject-specific.

ARGOS is a tool provided by the EU-funded open science network OpenAIRE. The generic catalogue of questions takes particular account of the European Commission's requirements for data management plans, which must be submitted by EU-funded projects.

DMPonline is being developed and provided by the UK Digital Curation Centre. It offers a generic English-language question catalogue and is available to users all over the world. However, the data servers are located in the UK and, since Brexit, outside the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation.

Just like their analogue counterparts, electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) are used to document laboratory experiments and their results. However, the electronic versions have many advantages, especially with regard to retrieving information and processing recorded data. The ELN Finder at TU Darmstadt will help you to find the ELN that best suits your needs.

Several NFDI consortia are currently developing or adapting subject-specific ELNs, which are expected to be available for free use by the respective communities in the near future. Institutional instances are also being set up at many places or are already ready to use. LUH provides an eLabFTW instance. This ELN is also expected to be available soon as part of the Academic Cloud.

Wikis are particularly suitable for holding and linking semi-structured information in text form. If well-organized and consistently maintained, they are much more efficient than loose collections of Word and PDF documents, for example. DokuWiki is available as part of the LUIS "Projektablage". Another open source wiki, which is also used by Wikipedia, is MediaWiki (installation on own server required).

Terminologies are collections of defined terms within a specific subject area. By using such terminologies, for example when collecting metadata, misinterpretations can be avoided and compatibility with other data from the same discipline can be increased.

With its terminology service, the TIB offers a central point of contact for terminologies from fields such as architecture, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics.

Ontologies go beyond mere terminologies, as they not only define terms, but also the relationships between these terms. They play a particularly important role in the machine processing of large amounts of data using artificial intelligence.

The ‘Linked Open Vocabularies’ page hosted by the Ontology Engineering Group (Madrid) is primarily used to search for ontologies and vocabularies from the field of engineering.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), based in the UK, offers an ‘Ontology Lookup Service’. This directory can be used to search for and find suitable ontologies from the field of biomedical research. An alternative is the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry (OBO).

The following tools help you design and conduct online surveys of all levels of complexity.

Note: The free version of the SoSciSurvey tool only allows anonymous surveys for scientific purposes!

Almost every conceivable type of statistical analysis can be carried out with the widely used open source program "R".

MAXQDA Analytics Pro is one of the most widely used software solutions for analysing qualitative data. LUH members profit from a campus licence.

jBEAM can be used to analyse and visualise measurement data. LUH has purchased a campus licence for the somewhat slimmed-down "Student Edition". It may also be used by non-student LUH members, but not in the context of projects funded by third-parties.

Do you know this situation? You want to analyse tabular data, but find that structure and content are inconsistent and incorrect. Typical problems are, for example:

• there is text in columns for numerical values
• several values are merged in the same cell
• special characters have not been coded correctly

With the "OpenRefine" programme, these and other inaccuracies can be corrected relatively quickly and semi-automatically.

Hmmmm, what does the file "APV20864XgbT.txt" contain again? Manually renaming many individual files is time-consuming and rarely free of errors. Fortunately, for such cases, there are tools such as RenameMaster. They can be used to change and standardize hundreds of file names in one go.

Do you want to create thumbnails of all the images in a folder? Or standardise the format? Or change the names? These and other work steps can be conveniently carried out using batch processing with IrfanView. For private use and for use in educational institutions (including universities) the software is free.

If you work a lot with analogue texts, you will face the task of having to digitize these texts entirely or partially for further evaluation. The PDF24 Creator bundles numerous tools for creating and editing PDF documents. These include automatic text recognition (OCR) in raster images (e.g. jpg or png).

F4 is one of the best-known transcription tools, which now also features an AI-powered function for automated transcription. LUH has acquired a campus licence for the tool and signed a data processing agreement with the manufacturer, ensuring that the tool, including its AI functions, can be used in compliance with data protection regulations.

Alternatively, the VoiceAI service is available in the Academic Cloud. When using this service, data is temporarily transferred to GWDG’s servers. This service has also been assessed for compliance with data protection regulations. However, there is currently no data processing agreement in place between LUH and GWDG.

The anonymisation tool QualiAnon is being developed by Qualiservice and Pangaea and supports the replacement of sensitive (usually personal) data in text-based research materials.

Paper cards on pinboards are still a popular tool for brainstorming. However, the more ideas that come together and need to be structured, the more annoying the repinning becomes. With the Freeplane software, mind maps can be created very easily and intuitively on the computer. This means that they can be expanded and restructured again and again as required.

Research projects usually have to be completed by a certain date. Things almost always get very tight towards the end. Solid time and task planning right at the beginning can quickly pay off, especially for larger projects with many participants. ProjectLibre is an open source tool that can help you with this planning. Alternatively, LUH members can use the project management software Rillsoft Project. With OpenProject, the Academic Cloud Niedersachsen also offers a comparable tool. OpenProject is also included in the LUIS Projektablage, albeit with some functional limitations. GitLab is often used as a project management tool as well, especially in the area of software development.

Institutional cloud storage has many advantages. For projects with multiple participants, they can be used as shared file storage, which simplifies sharing. Automatic versioning is often also provided. During field research, data synchronisation with the cloud storage ensures that the collected data is not lost if, for example, a mobile storage medium is lost.

As part of a LUIS Projektablage, you have access not only to the Projekt-Seafile cloud storage (limited to 100 GB) but also to HighSeas, which is optimised for large volumes of data. The Academic Cloud includes storage based on ownCloud, which works similarly to Projekt-Seafile.

Publishing research data is part of good scientific practice, provided there are no legal or ethical reasons to the contrary. LUH has an institutional repository in which all types of data can be stored, provided they are not personal. However, if a suitable subject-specific repository is available, it usually makes more sense to store the data there. The re3data.org metadirectory is a good way to search for such repositories.

In accordance with good scientific practice, at least the research data that forms the basis of a scientific publication should be stored for at least 10 years (as a rule). If this data itself cannot or may not also be published, it makes sense to store it in the LUIS data archive. Backup copies are automatically created there and the data carriers are regularly renewed. Only the person who has stored the data there has access to it.

Sufficiently long and complex passwords are essential for security, but are not always easy to remember. Repeatedly using the same short and possibly easy-to-guess passwords for different services, on the other hand, is a major security risk. A password manager such as KeePass makes it possible to manage an unlimited number of passwords. You then only need to remember a single (sufficiently long and complex) master password.

If you work with sensitive data, you should encrypt it to protect it from unauthorised access. VeraCrypt is a tried-and-tested open source programme that can be used to encrypt partitions or even entire hard drives relatively easily. For the highest security requirements, the programme also offers the option of nesting several encryption algorithms or hiding encrypted hard drive areas. The Cryptomator software is particularly suitable for encrypting data in cloud storages. Individual folders can also be encrypted with a packing programme such as WinRAR or 7zip.