Discover RDM - Research data management in studies and teaching at the University of Duisburg-Essen

Research data management (RDM) is not only important for PhD students and established researchers, it also forms the basis of academic training during studies. Therefore, the basics of RDM should also be taught to students in Bachelor's and Master's degree programs, building on data literacy skills. After all, students should know what fair data is and what requirements good scientific practice places on data management. This also applies to other aspects, such as the principles of applying standardized rules for data organization and documentation, the use of tools and the observance of legal and ethical aspects when reusing data. Training materials for students must meet high standards in terms of didactics. In terms of content, it is important to tie in with the needs and application scenarios of students in order to get them interested in the topic. When designing a program for students, it is important to consider whether this should be offered as part of the curriculum by lecturers from the subjects and/or as part of supplementary courses or, for example, as part of extracurricular information literacy programs offered by university libraries. The University Library (UB) of the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is developing a training program for students that aims to offer various connecting points for teaching. For example, 1.5 hours extracurricular training courses on the organisation of data and the subsequent use of data are offered every semester as part of the one-week series of events called "SchreibCamp der UB" (Writing Camp of the UB). To keep students interested, theory and practice are combined. At the same time, a self-study course on RDM for students is being developed, which will be offered as an extracurricular offering alongside existing courses in data literacy and digital humanities. The course focuses on strategies for searching and finding research data, organising large amounts of data, and legal aspects of re-use. Tools for RDM and their use, including for electronic lab notebooks and the handling of sensitive data, will also be presented and practised in thematic elective modules. In addition, an offer will be developed for the existing data community of lecturers at the UDE, which will include a train-the-lecturer program and should enable the implementation of cooperative concepts for self-study, blended learning or flipped classroom formats and/or team-teaching approaches. The development of RDM concepts at UDE is based on materials from the project "[email protected]", conducted between 2022 and 2024 with the University of Wuppertal, the Technical University of Cologne, and the State Initiative for Research Data Management. The learning materials are available as Open Educational Resources on the plattform "ORCA.nrw". Our contribution highlights the potentials and challenges of teaching RDM to students and presents strategies to overcome these challenges. We discuss collaborations at UDE and how linking good scientific practice, plagiarism prevention, RDM, and information literacy programs can promote data literacy skills.