Best Practices in Communicating Best Practices: Commentary on: ‘Developing and Communicating Responsible Data Management Policies to Trainees and Colleagues’

: We send messages as much in how we communicate as by what we communicate. Learning best practices, such as those for data management proposed in the accompanying article, are components of becoming a responsible and contributing member of the community of scholars. Not only must we teach the principles underlying best practices, we should model and teach approaches for implementing those practices and help students come to view them within the larger context of becoming members of a professional community. How to collaborate across differences and how to have disputes professionally are skills all professionals need, and they should be taught along with the content itself.