Things That Can Go Wrong

Irreproducible Results

In January 2020, tbe BBC reported Nobel Prize-winning scientist Frances Arnold retracts paper It was retracted because ‘the results were not reproducible, and the authors found data missing from a lab notebook‘. This is merely to illustrate that reproducibility is a big thing. If you ever had problems understanding or reusing your data, perhaps this helps you to imagine better it is no sinecure to ensure the entire world can understand and use your data. If you have indeed ever experienced difficulties to understand or resuse your own data, do not worry -you are certainly not the only one!

Data Disasters

The following are real examples where researchers or data centers have lost crucial data. Could any of these ever happen to you? With good planning you could avoid or reduce the impact of such occurrences.

Data Lost Forever

A Short Story

Not being prepared to share your data can lead to problems in using the data. In this short video, you see what shouldn’t happen when a researcher makes a data sharing request! Topics include storage, documentation, and file formats. A made-up, yet not unrealistic story.