Look at your consortium agreement, patent, funder contract or other contract to see whether you have to keep or destroy certain data. All data should not be published.

If you use personal data, you should also comply with RGPD. According to RGPD: personal data can only be preserved for the time necessary to reach the original goals of the data processing and must then be safely destroyed. However, there might be exceptions for scientific, statistical or historical purposes. Please look at our website for further information on RGPD. https://dial.uclouvain.be/RDM/node/52

For other data, you may choose what data to keep in considering their uniqueness, long-term value and potential of reuse. You may, for example, want to keep certain data to validate your publication’s results, for future teaching and research). However, take also into account the costs (time, software, etc.) and efforts required to preserve these data (and associated preparation, documentation, and storage steps).

Depending on these (legal) aspects, you may state a period of preservation: some data will be obsolete in 2, 5, 10 or 50 years, depending on the research topic.

For further information, see the DCC guide: How to appraise and select research data for curation. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/appraise-select-data