Data management and sharing plans
What are Data Management (and Sharing) Plans?
Before you begin your research, it's important to think about the data you plan to generate and develop a strategy to ensure you can understand the data and how to use it throughout the course of your project (and hopefully, long after!)
Data Management Plans (DMPs), sometimes characterized as Data Management and Sharing Plans (DMSPs), are written documents that describe the data you expect to generate or collect during the course of your research, your approach to handling, analyzing, describing and storing those data, and a plan for sharing and preserving the data at the end of your project.
Many funding agencies–like the NSF and NIH–require a DMSP as a part of the funding application. Specific requirements may vary from funder to funder, but a Public Access Memo issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in August 2022 has meant that each federal agency will have a data management planning requirement by the end of 2026.
What goes into a Data Management and Sharing Plan?
Although the federal government is working on ensuring that guidelines on writing DMSPs are consistent across agencies, by necessity, some variation will persist. After all, different disciplines produce different kinds of data that require distinct approaches to management.
Generally, you will be expected to describe following elements:
- Types and amounts of data to be generated
- The formats the data will take and the metadata used to describe the data
- The roles and responsibilities required to manage the data
- Any access, sharing or privacy concerns the data may present (e.g., if you are collecting human subjects data)
- Any policies or provisions for re-use and re-distribution of the data
- Strategies for data storage and long term preservation
- Any costs associated with managing the data, both during the project and long term
The NC State University Libraries offers some guidance on the typical elements of a Data Management and Sharing Plan.
Drafting your DMP or DMSP with DMPTool
A service developed and maintained by the California Digital Library, the DMPTool provides ready-to-use, agency-specific Data Management and Sharing Plan templates that can be used to draft your DMP.
In addition to general guidance, the Libraries offers a free DMP consultation service in which a small team of librarians with research data management expertise can provide specific advice on data documentation, storage, sharing and access considerations, defining project roles and responsibilities, and data repositories. Libraries staff will also review draft DMPs and generate detailed feedback.