QAMyData: An Open Source Tool for Checking (and Teaching) Data Quality

Social science research benefits from accountability and transparency, which is underpinned by high quality and trustworthy data. Data curation practices are still not widely appreciated and self-deposit repositories can still suffer from "quick and dirty" uploads. In addition, the tasks of checking, cleaning and documenting data by repository staff can be all too manual and time-consuming. The UK Data Service QAMyData tool is a free easy-to-use open source tool/web service that automatically detects some of the most common problems in survey/numeric data and creates a detailed report on the data file submitted (a "data health check"). Data depositors can act on the results and resubmit the file until a "clean bill of health"/certificate is produced. In addition, a high quality codebook is produced, both useful takeaways to demonstrate quality assurance for onward submission to a journal or repository. The tool offers a number of configurable tests for numeric data files (file /data; metadata; direct identifiers) that data publishers can configure, and select thresholds for their own acceptance testing; enabling them to create a unique Data Quality Profile that helps them meet FAIR data requirements. The grant also delivered a training module on what makes a clean and well-documented numeric dataset