FAQ - Coscine

If there is no storage space (left), the project owner must apply for additional storage space. You can find the application form here: Storage Management 

• Note: Bachelor/Master students do not receive storage space in Coscine, the project must always be created by the employed supervisor (see Storage Management).

Data Security

• Resource - Research Data Store (RDS-Web and RDS-S3)

The Research Data Store (RDS) is operated by a consortium of universities (RWTH Aachen, University of Cologne, University of Duisburg-Essen, Ruhr University Bochum and Technical University Dortmund) and is therefore subject to strict data protection guidelines. The RDS is based on modern object store technology and is protected against loss by site-redundant storage. Data is stored redundantly at at least 3 locations in NRW, so that a total failure of a data center can be compensated. Data security is ensured at the local sites via erasure coding.

• Resource - External storage systems

The security of data in external systems (e.g. Linked Data, GitLab or Sciebo) remains in the hands of the respective operators. Therefore, it is recommended to rely on trusted and established services such as Sciebo, the Gitlab of RWTH Aachen University or similar. The associated metadata in Coscine is stored locally according to similar standards, protected from unauthorized access and backed up.
 
Data access security
 
Coscine uses state-of-the-art security technologies to protect your data, and transmission to end devices is SSL-encrypted. This also ensures the security of communication with the various types of resources. All systems are operated according to BSI basic protection. As a university consortium, there is also no interest in passing on the data of its own researchers.
 

General

Coscine can integrate different data sources (resource types). Depending on the resource type (e.g. FDS, Gitlab), the corresponding usage rules apply to data (e.g. Gitlab usage rules).

Resource type FDS

The Research Data Store (FDS) is provided only by Coscine and allows use exclusively for research data.

Special case: personal data

Personal research data (e.g. psychological / medical origin) can be accessed through Coscine (see Terms of Use). In this case, the user must ensure that the usage rules of the resource type used allow the storage and management of personal data.

Personal data can be stored on RWTH-FDS resources. In addition, we always recommend encryption and pseudonymization of personal data.

The right metadata schema or application profile depends heavily on the subject focus of your project. There are subject-specific (e.g. EngMeta) and generic (e.g. RADAR) metadata schemas or application profiles (see About Metadata and Application Profiles). Established metadata standards have already evolved for different domains. Unfortunately, we cannot provide domain-specific advice, please contact your subject-specific NFDI, Data Stuart, the Ontology Lookup Service or forschungsdaten.info for this.

If you cannot find a suitable application profile in Coscine, you can create one yourself. You can find all important information about this under About Metadata and Application Profiles.

If the given metadata schemes / application profiles turn out to be insufficient for your purpose, you can find under Metadata and Application Profiles a guide to get an individual application profile.

You can select a license for your research data in Coscine when creating resources to determine if and how your data can be reused. For research data, based on recommendations from forschungsdaten.info, we recommend using the open and free Creative Commons Licenses (CC licenses). In Germany, the following requirements for licensing must be met:  

• Your research data is protected by the German Copyright 
• You are the author and/or right holder of the research data

Unfortunately, we cannot offer legal advice on licenses. If you are unsure, you can find more information about copyright and publishing research data at forschungsdaten.info. 

In the interest of open science, we recommend that you clarify whether open licenses are suitable for your research data. If you are legally uncertain, you can leave the field blank. If you do not select a license and your research data is protected by copyright, German copyright law automatically applies.

Note: Choosing an open license (e.g. CC BY 4.0) in Coscine does not automatically make the data publicly available. The license is just another piece of information (i.e. a metadata field) about the data. To learn how to make your data publicly available, see Publication and Findability of Data.

Research data is stored for 10 years after the end of the project ensuring good scientific practice. You can find more precise regulations on the storage periods for various data (user data, research data, metadata) in the data protection declaration.

You can add other researchers to a project via their email address (if it is from a participating organization) or via their ORCID ID. The instructions can be found under the Rights and Participants Management.

If you do not see an email address in projects for yourself or other researchers, this is probably due to the login via ORCID. The reason is that Coscine does not receive information about personal data, such as email addresses from ORCID. 

Please go to your user profile and add your email address and any other information there (see Personal Data for instructions).

There are two ways to publish your data (e.g. for a publication) in Coscine. Under Data Publication you will find all further information.

If you have used the RDS-Web resource via the browser, your files may be too large. Many browsers allow max. 2-3 GB file size.

In this case, use either the Coscine Rest API or an RDS-S3 resource. You can also use your application profile for this.

If you have problems with the upload on other resources please write to servicedesk@rwth-aachen.de.

For each subproject, storage space must be requested separately in the application of the main project (see Subprojects and Storage Space Management). 

If you forgot to request subprojects or want to create them later, there are two scenarios:

1. You stay with the requested storage space in total, but divide it differently between the main project and the subprojects (e.g. from 500 GB only in the main project to 250 GB in the main project and 250 GB in the subproject). Then send an email to servicedesk@itc.rwth-aachen.de
2. You exceed the requested storage space. Please then make a new request (see Storage Space Management).

The motivation behind Coscine is to offer researchers a safe and supportive integration platform for collaborative research.

We try to make Coscine easy to integrate into the existing processes of researchers and to deliver additional value in data management by integrating various established services for research management into one system. Many research projects can benefit from this.

If you are not sure whether or how you can use Coscine, please contact the IT-ServiceDesk directly. As part of the RDM team at RWTH Aachen University, we can advise you on how to use Coscine, but we can also point out other solutions if they meet your needs more adequately.

There is no specific limit to the number of resources that can be stored in a project. Since the data in a resource is described with a common metadata scheme, it can make sense within more complex projects to have several resources of one type in order to describe different data types with corresponding metadata schemes.

It is possible that you have logged in via two different services and that you are assigned different projects.

You can easily connect these accounts to have access to all your projects, regardless of the log-in method.

The instruction can be found under Connecting log-in methods.