Data Management and Sharing

This page assumes you are writing a data management plan for a funding agency based in the United States. Funding agencies in other countries likely have similar requirements, but always check your individual funder requirements, especially if they are based in another country. Contact us any time for help!

The NSF provides general guidance on what should be included in any good data management plan:

1. Type of data.  Is it experimental measurements, sequencing, images, geospatial, qualitative?  Or other types of research outputs, such as physical collections, software, code, curriculum?
2. Organization and documentation of data.  What is the data format? How will you document your data so that it can be identified and understood by you and others?  What documentation and metadata do you need so the data can be discovered by others?
3. Access and sharing.  What policies and provisions do you need for appropriate protection of privacy, confidentiality, security, intellectual property or other rights or requirements?
4. Reuse.  How might your data be reused? How will your data be licensed for reuse by others? Will you need restrictions on data sharing to protect proprietary or patentable data?
5. Where will your data be archived and preserved? For how long? How will access to the data be preserved?

• NIH, National Institutes of Health: Human Clinical Trial data, National Institute for Child Health and Human Development
  • https://sharing.nih.gov/sites/default/files/flmngr/Example_DMS_Plan_Clinical-Trial-NIH_Format_Page.pdf 
• DoD, Department of Defense: Graph-Based Stochastic Learning to Build Physics-Informed AI for Discovering Defect Mechanisms in Powder-based Fabrication
  • https://doi.org/10.48321/D1HH0S
• NSF, National Science Foundation: Analyzing Diversity Efforts in Public Radio Organizations
  • https://zenodo.org/records/4710327#.YJLv931KhTY
• NEH, National Endowment for the Humanities: A Community Workbench for Studying Enlightenment Media
  • https://dmptool.org/public_plans?search=A+Community+Workbench+for+Studying+Enlightenment+Media&sort_by=featured
• NASA Heliophysics Science Division: Connecting the Accretion History of the Trojan Family to Their Solar Environment through Observations of Diffuse Interplanetary Dust in Jovian Orbits
  • https://doi.org/10.48321/D1DC3C2A4C
• Department of Justice/National Institute of Justice: Court Workforce Racial Diversity and Racial Justice in Criminal Case Outcomes in the United States
  • https://dmptool.org/public_plans?search=Court+Workforce+Racial+Diversity&sort_by=featured
• DoE, Department of Energy: Determining Fundamental Properties of Tritiated Hydrogen to Advance Fusion Energy Technology
  • https://doi.org/10.48321/D14DAE1B84
• For more, see "DMP Competition Winners: DMPs so good they go to 11"
  • https://blog.dmptool.org/2021/05/19/dmp-competition-winners-dmps-so-good-they-go-to-11/

Typically, funding agencies not only recognize and but also expect researchers will incur costs associated with data management and sharing. For this reason, researchers can and should include projected costs for data management and sharing in grant budgets.  Below are some resources:

• The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine developed resources around Forecasting Costs of Preserving, Archiving, and Promoting Access to Biomedical Data to help researchers with budgeting these costs for biomedical data.
• The NIH provides specific guidance on Budgeting for Data Management and Sharing which includes information on allowable costs, unallowable costs, requesting and justifying costs, and more.  
• The NSF allows use of grant funds to pay for costs associated with preparing and depositing data, as stated in the NSF's FAQs for Public Access (Q46 and Q47). Funds should be requested as a direct cost in the grant's budget proposal.

The DMP Tool is a free, open source, web-based application to help researchers create a data management plan that meets grant funder requirements. It provides sidebar guidance as well as sample answers and fill-in-the-blank prompts.