Of course this will only work in some jurisdictions, and even then it needs stronger enforcement to ensure that data controllers will comply (or even understand their obligations).
Fair enough. It does work for my simple use case: rsync student coursework to the remarkable, mark coursework on the remarkable, rsync back. There aren't many small file changes and USB is fast enough. The real bottleneck is the marking but I'm not sure if I want a package manager to help me with that!
As others have pointed out, that doesn't quite work. But the way that I use rsync with my remarkable is to use sshfs to mount the remarkable's filesystem, and then run rsync between the local and mounted filesystems. Works for me without having to install rsync on the remarkable.
I had my Masters students do this as part of my wireless networking class this year. It was very instructive for me and the students seemed to enjoy it, so I'll definitely keep it in the syllabus.
Unfortunately not everyone reports this information. Here is a study that we did of over 500 papers using online social network data: http://tnhh.org/research/pubs/tetc2015.pdf While most authors would report high-level characteristics (e.g., which social network they measured), fewer authors reported how they sampled the network or collected data, and very few people reported on how they handled ethics, privacy and so forth.
The article's description of a DOI is a bit vague. It isn't just a link. When you register a DOI, you have to register the metadata, which are then stored with your DOI registration agency (like crossref or datacite). e.g., 10.15783/C7F59T is a DOI for one of our datasets. If you follow http://doi.org/10.15783/C7F59T in your browser then you get taken to our data archive, but if that goes away then you can still query the metadata at datacite (http://data.datacite.org/10.15783/C7F59T)
Simply providing the ability to upload data only solves a small part of the problem. We run the CRAWDAD wireless network data archive (http://crawdad.org/) and the hardest parts are: convincing people to share data; ensuring that the data can be shared (much of the time this is not possible due to consent, data protection, etc); sanitising the data; and finally (and most time-consumingly) creating appropriate metadata so that the data are meaningful to other researchers.
The Research Data Alliance (http://rd-alliance.org/) is trying to solve many of these problems.
Of course this will only work in some jurisdictions, and even then it needs stronger enforcement to ensure that data controllers will comply (or even understand their obligations).