A Novel Approach to Outlining Research Data Management Life Cycle: A Case Study

In the increasingly complex domain of academic research, efficient and effective Research Data Management (RDM) emerges as a vital component. It offers a systematic approach to managing, preserving, and sharing data, fostering improved collaboration, and ensuring reproducibility while maintaining compliance with relevant funding and institutional regulations. Given the multifaceted nature of RDM, there is a pressing need for an accurate method to outline its phases and determine the exact stage of a research project within these phases to assist service managers in the early identification of user challenges and discover process-aware requirements. This paper addresses this demand by presenting an innovative methodology that leverages process mining techniques to discover and assess the various phases of RDM and to measure the current RDM activities of research projects. Moreover, this proposed methodology is evaluated by applying it to an extensive series of recorded user interactions within an active RDM platform. The approach has been found to provide valuable insights into the RDM life cycle, opening a window into monitoring and sustaining the progress of research projects and the activities of research groups, thereby significantly contributing to the understanding and optimization of the RDM process within the broader academic research community.