SURF Research Day 2024

We present the design of a data management structure for the Growing Up Together in Society (GUTS) consortium. GUTS is a collaboration of researchers from seven universities and different disciplines (neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, sociology), with a mission to understand how young people grow up in a complex society. Research support staff and researchers work together to design the GUTS data management system that maximizes intuitive data findability and accessibility while preserving personal data privacy. The strength of the system lies in the interoperability between its main components: - Structured datasets are stored in iRODS/Yoda, where metadata can be extracted automatically, thus separating the personal data from their descriptive metadata. - Harmonized metadata are then made available publicly via an external, user-facing metadata explorer that provides researchers with a data filtering and “basket checkout” functionality data for tailored dataset access requests. Access requests are handled by data managers/stewards, and approvals will automatically make the data subset available on the local Yoda instance of the researcher’s institution. In this presentation we will show how our collaboration is beneficial for all parties involved. Key points are the advantage of starting from the initial phase of the project, the use of existing open source solutions such as iRODS and Yoda, and involvement of researchers and research support. Bringing these perspectives together from the start allows us to build a scalable data management solution for a large and complex research collaboration. All software and materials are made publicly available for reuse by others.