Profile Research Data Policy

The availability of research data guarantees that research data can be reproduced and verified after publication, as well as put to further use. This is a key aspect of good scientific practice at the university. Managing it according to the highest standards builds on this principle and is part of the Excellence Strategy.

1. Responsibility for the life cycle (*) of research data, in particular saving and supplying research data for long-term archiving, lies primarily with the Principal Investigators (PIs).
2. Every research project shall include a data management plan that explicitly addresses the way the accuracy, completeness, authenticity, integrity, trustworthiness and publication of data are handled, as well as open access to data. The plan shall take account of subject-specific features.
3. The university supports the PIs to the best of its ability through a Research Data Unit. The unit offers to advise and support them in developing models for their data management. In order for this to happen, contact needs to take place at an early stage, either in advance or when the project is starting.
4. The research data management plan shall ensure access and use while complying with ethical and open-access principles requiring suitable safety measures. Following the university’s open-access policy, the university leadership expressly encourages scientists to make research data available in accordance with the principles of open access as described in the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities” of 2003, as long as there are no legal obligations to the contrary (in particular, contracts with publishing houses). For data forming the basis of patentable intellectual property, a prior obligation exists, as a matter of principle, to report an invention under the Employee Invention Act (Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz) (§§5, 42 no. 2) and the IP Policy of Heidelberg University.
5. Personal details about test-persons, patients and other persons concerned by data collections shall be protected pursuant to the data protection regulations.
6. Data held outside the university as part of the data management plan should be registered with the Research Data Unit. The Research Data Unit provides a data registration showing data sets from both university and external repositories.
7. All rights to data, in particular the right to continuing use or publication of data, should be reserved to the PIs and not be granted to third parties.