Open Research Data of the Academic Institutes Abroad: Pilot projects

The project Open Research Data of the Finnish Academic Institutes abroad, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Culture and Education, 2018–2020, had as its aim to develop a set of policies and best practices for digital research management in these institutes. The institutes that participated in the project were the Institutum Romanum Finlandiae (the coordinating organization), the Finnish Institute at Athens, the Finnish Institute in the Middle East and the Finnish Institute in Japan. At the outset, it was deemed important to focus on practical issues of digital research data management. The institutes are very small organizations, and an extensive set of abstract policies would have been of little use for these organizations; a set of documented experiments with real data from the institutes was deemed to be useful for gaining understanding on the practical issues of digital research data management in all its stages. For this purpose, four pilot projects were chosen. The projects had specific aims each, alongside with the common goal of gaining useful experience in managing research data. The particularities of each pilot project are described in connection of each project below.