PsyCuraDat: Developing curation criteria and standards enabling the sustainable (re)use of psychological research data

PsyCuraDat: Developing curation criteria and standards enabling the sustainable (re)use of psychological research data. In the course of the open science movement, sharing research data in order to increase the sustainable (re-)use of the data has increasingly become commonplace. The PsyCuraDat project was created to support psychologists in documenting their research data in a sustainable way by developing discipline-specific curation criteria and standards for psychological research data. The project’s work began by investigating existing curation criteria and standards, assessing their reuse potential and querying the nature of necessary information and requirements for the sustainable (re-)use of research data in psychology. Further research, including expert interviews and several user studies with researchers in psychology, lead to the development of prototype versions of a documentation standard which were then tested and evaluated for their usability. As the project’s outcome, a data documentation standard called D-Psy-FAIR was finally developed enabling the comprehensible linkage between information on the project, design, measurement and data of a given study. Specifically, D-Psy-FAIR comprises four documentation steps including the creation of a study-description (step 1), the creation of an extended codebook (step 2), the documentation of data preparation and analysis scripts (step 3), as well as the creation of a graphical overview of the research data process (step 4). Following the D-Psy-FAIR documentation approach, which is imparted through learning materials and tutorials developed within the project, leads to the creation of (re-)usable and thus sustainable data. Further, the D-Psy-FAIR standard’s establishment in relevant infrastructures (e.g. the data documentation tool DataWiz) improves their interoperability that serves the purpose of data archiving as well as data sharing. In this poster, we would like to introduce D-Psy-FAIR and present our approach to sustainable data documentation in psychology