Archiving

Documentation and good data management are the first steps, followed by secure storage and handling – but you also need to think about what will happen to your documentation and data in the future. Is it enough to store the information until the end of the project or do you need to wait ten years? Or maybe the information should be stored for all eternity = archiving.

To find out what, when and how research documentation should be archived check out the instructions at Archiving research and Records Schedule for documents at KI. If you have questions, contact the university archivists at arkivet@ki.se.

According to Dokumenthanteringsplan för Karolinska Institutets handlingar, not everything needs to be archived. For example manuscript drafts may be disposed of when the final manuscript has been submitted. Most research documentation and data has to be stored for 10 years after the end of the research project, or 15 years if the research concerns clinical trials, before you can dispose of it. Rejected funding applications can be disposed of two years after the end of the relevant research project. It is only documents and data you need to store for longer time periods (10 [15] years or more) that should be transferred to an archive for preservation. Data materials which are unique (cannot be obtained from other sources) must be archived forever. Some of the types of documents and/or data that should be archived are:

Valuable (hard/difficult to reproduce) primary data
Project plans
Publications
Templates of questionnaires
Ethical approvals

When deciding on preservation and archiving documents it is also important to document metadata (basically data about data, usually a description of the content of a digital document) connected to the documents. When a document has been archived, it is by default public, but secrecy may apply.