The rights holder decides on the possible publication of research data. If, for example, external data ("third-party data") without a corresponding license was used for the thesis, written permission must be obtained from the "owner" before publication. Even if other persons at TU Wien, e.g. a fellow student or the supervisor at the institute, were involved in generating the data, a written agreement on publication must be made with them. The agreement must specify the data and regulate important publication details, such as the license to be granted and the authors (creators) to be named. You are welcome to use our template for an agreement on the use of thesis data, opens a file in a new window and adapt it to your needs.

Side note: The agreement also applies in the other direction, namely if TU Wien wishes to publish the data and requires the student's consent. To regulate the publication of data and materials generated by students in the course of their studies but not in connection with a thesis, you can use the template for an agreement on the use of study data, opens a file in a new window. Please note: If the thesis or activity is carried out as part of a third-party-funded project, the agreement templates cannot be used. In this case, please contact the Service Unit Research and Transfer Support (E058-02), opens an external URL in a new window.

Examples: 

1. As part of her Bachelor's thesis, student X analyses digital water temperature data collected by Institute Y over a longer period and provided to her by her supervisor. Neither the institute nor the student has a copyright to the data since pure measurement data is not covered by the copyright law. However, since the exploitation right of the data lies with TU Wien, a written agreement between the student, the supervisor, and the head of the research unit as a representative of TU Wien stipulates that the student may publish the data as "underlying data" for her Bachelor's thesis. The data will be published under a CC BY licence for good scientific practice and to make it easier to find.
2. Student Z is creating a photo documentation of the front of the Karlsplatz 13 building as part of his bachelor's thesis. The numerous photos he has taken for this purpose will later be included in a project about the 4th district sponsored by the City of Vienna and published by TU Wien as a photo collection. A written agreement between the student, his supervisor, and the research group manager (representing TU Wien) states that TU Wien may publish the photos under a CC BY license. As the photographer, Student Z holds the copyright to his pictures and must be named as the creator in the metadata. In addition, the supervisor points out that no persons may be recognisable in the photos for data protection reasons.

Raw data (or primary data) are data obtained directly from a data collection or collected from an observation of a phenomenon, such as unprocessed, unchecked, and uncommented measurement data or video recordings. According to the definition in the Policy for Research Data Management of TU Wien, they are just as much part of research data as processed data and code. The question of whether only the raw data, only the processed data, or everything should be published must be decided on a case-by-case basis. The decisive factor is the value of this data in the context of understanding the Bachelor's thesis and for possible subsequent use by third parties.

In the data repository, each data set is stored together with describing metadata. This metadata is requested or automatically filled in when the data is uploaded. For students of TU Wien, we suggest the following entries:

• Affiliation: TU Wien (pre-filled). This information is correct for students writing their thesis at TU Wien and should not be changed.
• Creator: In the "Creator" field, enter the names of the persons who carried out the work and generated the data. The creator or creators are responsible for the content, accessibility, and license to use the uploads. As a rule, the name of the student will therefore appear here. The extent to which other persons, such as the supervisors of the Bachelor's thesis, should also be named here depends on the rights to the data (see question above). All creators are named in the citation text.
• Contributor: Persons involved in generating the data alongside the creators, e.g., laboratory staff or supervisors, are listed here. The contributors are mentioned in the sense of good scientific practice and for information purposes only; their names do not appear in the citation text.
• Documentation: In the data repository, great importance is given to the documentation of the uploaded data because the data is only understandable and reusable for others (and for oneself at a later date) with a meaningful description. To help you write the description, there is a separate field in the input mask with suggestions for the content. In addition, README files containing further details can be uploaded together with the data.
• Related works: Here, you can create a link to relevant publications. This can be your thesis, for example. The prerequisite is that the work has been published digitally and given a permanent and unique identifier (e.g. DOI). In contrast to diploma, Master's and doctoral theses, Bachelor's theses cannot be published in reposiTUm, TU Wien's open access platform for scientific publications, university theses and digital copies. Instead, the general repository Zenodo can be used, for example. Zenodo assigns a DOI to the uploaded work, which can be entered in the "related work" field in TU Wien Research Data. Conversely, the published data can (and should) be referred to in the thesis using the data DOI.

No, the data upload and publication occur one after the other in a controlled manner and in teamwork. The students take care of uploading and describing the data. A member of the repository team then checks the entry and only presses the "publish" button when everything is OK. That's because once the data has been published, it can no longer be deleted or changed to ensure its permanence. On the other hand, the descriptive information (metadata) can still be added to and edited later. Instructions for the individual steps involved in uploading can be found in the Upload Guide of the data repository, opens a file in a new window.

In research projects, a data management plan (DMP) is often drawn up to describe the research data to be used or generated. The DMP also contains information about the storage locations of the data during the project, access rights, and possible publication of the data after the project has been completed. In principle, such a DMP can also be created for the data you use for your thesis. Of course, it does not have to be as detailed as for a large research project, but it is a good opportunity to get an early idea of the data that will play a role in your thesis together with your supervisor. We recommend creating a first version of the DMP right at the beginning and adding details later. You can use the TU Wien DMP Tool, opens an external URL in a new window to draft the DMP.