Workshop
Love Data Week: To keep or discard, a workshop on research data retention
- Femmy Admiraal, Céline Richard, Pascal Flohr
- Datum
- donderdag 12 februari 2026
- Tijd
- Toelichting
- De voertaal van de workshop is Engels.
- Bezoekadres
-
University Library
Witte Singel 27
2311 BG Leiden - Zaal
- Learning Zone, Willeram
Omdat de workshop in het Engels is, is de onderstaande informatie verder ook in het Engels.
For International Love Data Week, we are having an in-person workshop focusing on how to decide on retaining or discarding research datasets. The workshop, a follow-up from a workshop conducted at the Groningen Open Science Festival, has a target audience of data stewards and data professionals as well as other Leiden people with an interest in the topic.
Abstract and programme
Roughly a decade has passed since the FAIR principles were coined, and in that decade, we have seen a growing interest in publishing research data and a rise in the number of datasets being published. In that same decade, the minimal retention period for research data has often been set at 10 years in guidelines and policies (e.g. Data Management Regulations Leiden University 2021). While this gave a minimum period, the unwritten assumption has often been that the aim was –with some exceptions- to keep data indefinitely.
Moreover, FAIR, in essence, promotes the permanent keeping of published research data. However, ten years on, we are now in a situation where we realize that maybe not everything needs to be kept permanently, and that we should instead consider a more selective approach, because of environmental consequences, information overload, as well as financial considerations. Therefore, we now face the challenge of making informed decisions about retaining or discarding datasets. So how do we decide what to keep, and what the following steps are, and who gets to make these decisions?
This workshop will start with an overview of the state-of-the-art guidelines and policies around preservation and retention. After that we focus, in moderated groups and using several concrete examples of published datasets, on four key aspects of future-proof data publishing in the interactive part:
- Meaningful selection: what to store and in what formats
- Appraisal/re-appraisal: criteria, how to make the decision, who decides what
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How to formalize this in a sustainable way: who will still be there after 10 years?
This session
This Connect & session takes place in-person as a workshop at the Library and will last two hours. If you are part of the Leiden University Research Data Management Community you will have received an invitation. If you are not on the contact list and would like to take part, please email us at datamanagement@library.leidenuniv.nl. Basic knowledge of research data management is required for the workshop; when in doubt, please just send us an email to check.
About the Connect & sessions
This event is part of the “Connect and …” series arranged by, and for, the Leiden University Research Data Management Community, on everything data management-related. The sessions take place every month at different days and times, so as to maximize access according to people’s different working hours, and normally take place online. Topics and speakers are proposed by members of the Community. You can post a suggestion in the Community's MSTeams space, or write to datamanagement@library.leidenuniv.nl, if you have a topic you would like to discuss in a future meeting and the CDS team will help to make it happen.