What are Data Management Plans?
A Data Management Plan (DMP) outlines how data will be collected, organized, stored, secured, shared, and preserved in a research project. It covers data collection methods, organization, storage, sharing, preservation, ethics, and researcher responsibilities. DMPs promote transparency and maximize research impact by ensuring your data can be used effectively, by you, your collaborators, and future generations of researchers. They can be a powerful tool for thinking in advance about collaborative research workflows and can help forecast financial costs associated with data so they can be written into budgets and funded.
DMPs are increasingly required by federal grant funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Different funders have different policies, so it is important to look at the requirements of the granting agency to learn about their Data Policies and Compliance.
What tools can help me write a DMP?
The DMPTool from the California Digital Library is an online tool for creating DMPs. It has templates and resources to guide you through the process of creating a DMP that is in compliance with funder requirements.
What is included in a DMP?
DMPs are brief (2-3 page) documents that outline in advance how you will manage your data throughout the life of your project. They often include:
- How the data will be collected
- The type or format of data collected
- The size of the data
- How the data will be described (i.e., will you be using codebooks, logs, specific metadata standards, ontologies, etc.)
- Where the data will be stored, backed up and secured if necessary
- How the data will be analyzed
- How the data will be shared and preserved, or reasons not to do so, including who will have permissions to use the data