Biocenter Oulu Data Management Policy

Biocenter Oulu Research Infrastructures operate several different services for analysing biological and medical samples. They provide research services for hundreds of customers per year including academic research groups, biobanks, hospitals, and industry.

Biocenter Oulu is not a legal entity in regard to data ownership or handling. Biocenter Oulu follows University of Oulu general data management policies and regulations and strives to ensure that all data produced by technology platforms will comply with FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable). Biocenter Oulu infrastructures are also part of Biocenter Finland network, and Biocenter Finland provides recommendations and best practices to the Biocenter Oulu technology platforms.

The experimental data types can vary between different infrastructure services, but can be categorized to laboratory notes, raw data files from experiments (text files, tables, images), and experimental analysis files (3D reconstructions, structure factors, processed data in chromatograms and tables).

The main relevant data types are:

The resulting data types vary significantly in size (raw, processed and metadata) and complexity.

The amount of data per experiment is dependent on the techniques but can vary between kilobytes and terabytes. On a yearly level this will add up to a high terabyte level between all infrastructure services.

Customer owns the data and has the right to use the data. We recommend licensing open research outputs under the Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 license.

The obtained research outputs are subject to University's Responsible Research guidelines unless a separate agreement has been made (e.g. commercial users).

We encourage users to make their data and the descriptive metadata FAIR compliant (discoverable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) whenever possible. Discipline-specific international data archives or national Fairdata services are recommended for data sharing.

Information for citing of infrastructure is available on Biocenter Oulu web page.

This work/Part of the work was carried out with the support of Biocenter Oulu, Name of the Research Infrastructure, University of Oulu, Finland. Where Name of the Research Infrastructure staff have made a significant contribution to the conduct of the research, it is appropriate that they be acknowledged as co-authors of the publication. In this case, the relevant institutional affiliation should be recorded as Name of the Research Infrastructure, University of Oulu, Finland.

Some form of attribution is required in the 'Acknowledgements' section of your publication. For publications without an 'Acknowledgements' section, the attribution should be made either as a footnote to the title or included as a reference when the work is described in the 'Experimental' section.

We recommend that the descriptive metadata are stored in a national (e.g. using Qvain) or international data repository or archive that provides a persistent identifier (e.g., DOI or URN) and allows the data to be citable.

Metadata is produced by instruments during experiments. This metadata is stored in a separate data files (such as .csv) and/or is included in the file headers. Structural metadata describes the instrument and experimental parameters that were used. During the experiment phase users are recording metadata in parallel mostly using (electronic) laboratory notebooks. Specific experimental approaches usually have their own metadata standards.

New data produced is stored temporarily on computers that control instruments, or on University of Oulu servers, and transferred to customer, or the customers themselves store the data, into their own storage systems. Copies of data are stored in University of Oulu servers for only a short time after which they are deleted unless agreed otherwise. The access to the data is only for limited personnel of the core facilities and protected with a password. Customers can access only their own data.