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Off-Boarding

Before your contract ends there are some important aspects regarding the re-use and archiving of your work at UFZ and beyond. We recommend to start your RDM offboarding about three months before you leave.

Responsibilities

  • Departing Employee
    • Assesses data and software
    • Grants access
    • Documents the offboarding
  • Supervisor
    • Oversees the offboarding
    • Coordinates with data representative

Your Data

Before you leave, you provide means to access and interpret important data, that were produced during your time at UFZ. If you stored your data in any of the following storage locations, you need to transfer them to a commonly accessible location, such as a group network folder:

  • Nextcloud home directory
  • Network drive home directory
  • Large storage solutions (UFZ-S3, HIFIS-dCache, etc)
  • Third party tools
  • External hard drives

Move data to shared storage resources to allow further access by your direct supervisor, particularly if it is currently stored in an account that is connected to your UFZ E-Mail.

Attach metadata to your datasets to allow the interpretation of your data as well as reproducibility of your project.

Consider publishing curated data sets: If you produced data sets that are annotated or otherwise related to a text publication, consider publishing these data sets individually to allow for re-use by the scientific community and beyond.

  • Attach metadata and transparently describe your work
  • Transfer data to a commonly accessible location
    • from your Nextcloud home directory
    • from your network drive home directory
    • from large storage solutions (e.g. UFZ-S3, HIFIS-dCache)
    • from third party tools
    • from external hard drives
  • Publish curated data sets with a DOI

Your Software

Before you leave, you provide means to access important software, that was produced during your time at UFZ. UFZ contains usage rights on any software produced during your contract at UFZ. However, you also retain the rights to software or any intelectual property you produced. We generally encourage you to make your software available under an open source licence. A list of open source licenses can be found at https://opensource.org/licenses. Further, we encourage you to publish your software as a software publication with a DOI.

It is important to consider that anything you produced in terms of code might be of importance later on. A shared data set might be difficult to use for future work if the script to analyze it is gone.

  • Make your software available under an open source licence
  • Publish your software with a DOI