Data Management Plans

All researchers, including postgraduate students, are encouraged to have a Data Management Plan in place — and thus fully consider the management of their research data — before the start of a research project. This plan is a living document that will change and grow as your research projects progresses. Your inital plan could be very concise.

According to the University’s research data management policy a Data Management Plan is compulsory for all publicly-funded research that is conducted at the University. It is considered best practice for all other research.

In addition, funding bodies are increasingly requiring Data Management Plans from their grant-holders at the bid-preparation stage. Many research funders, including all UK Research Councils and the European Commission, have research data policies that specify their expectation of how grant holders will manage, preserve and share their data.

Some of the benefits of planning the management and sharing of your research data as early as possible include that it helps you to

• identify issues and strategies early in your research project
• ensure that you have documented your compliance with institutional and funder policies and ethics approval requirements
• make sure that your data remains useful and is stored securely during the lifetime of your project and beyond, so that you can find and understand your data when you need to use it, so that you avoid data loss or data corruption, so that there is continuity if project staff leave or new researchers join, and to avoid unnecessary duplication by re-collecting or re-working data
• think about data sharing and reuse opportunities of your research data

You plan for the entire life of your research data, especially

• storing your data safely during your project
• keeping it for the long-term and possibly sharing your data after your project
• explaining it through careful documentation of your data, so that you and others can make sense of it

A typical research data management plan provides information on (a selection of) the following topics, depending on the funder’s requirements or your specific needs

• data collection
• documentation and metadata
• ethics and legal compliance
• storage and backup
• selection and preservation
• data sharing
• responibilities and resources

The Digital Curation Centre has produced an extensive Checklist for a Data Management Plan with all topics that a data management plan could (but not necessarily should) contain.

If you are developing software, then writing a Software Management Plan may be an option to ensure your software is accessible and reusable in the short, medium and long term. A template for a Software Management Plan has been developed by the Software Sustainability Institute.

General advice
The general advice for DMPs (given in this video by Peter Dukes of the MRC) is to keep it ‘specific’ as well as ‘simple and short’. For some projects where data sharing is not on the agenda, a quarter of a page may be enough. For other projects, a statement of up to 2 pages is generally sufficient.

If you are using DMPOnline to write your plan, the tool will indicate when you have reached a length that is generally considered to be sufficient for a DMP that is part of a funding application.

The Digital Curation Centre has developed an online data management planning tool, DMPOnline. DMPOnline contains

• templates for each major research funder that requires a data management plan as part of a funding application
• a generic SHU template for all other research conducted at Sheffield Hallam University
• a generic SHU template for PGR students
• SHU specific guidance that will help you to fill out the form
• suggested answers for certain questions for you to copy and paste
• example answers taken from previous data management plans written by SHU researchers

How to get started

Follow this guidance or watch the video at the top of this page

If you have never used DMPOnline before, you should first create an account. You can link your DMPOnline account to your SHU credentials, so that you can always log into DMPOnline using your normal SHU username and password. Simply follow these steps:

• Go to https://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk
• Sign up. You will be asked to fill out a short form to create your DMPOnline account. This includes your email address and any password
• You will be sent a confirmation email with a link that you will have to click in order to activate your account
• That’s it. You’re ready to go!

How to create a new plan

• Go to https://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk and sign in
• Click on ‘Create plan’
• Choose your funder, or leave this field blank if you are writing a generic DMP that is not funder-specific
• Select ‘Sheffield Hallam University’ to see SHU’s institutional guidance to help you fill out your plan
• Click on ‘Create plan’

How to share your plan with others

Once finished, you can share your plan with others, and download (‘export’) it as a pdf or Word document (docx).

You are asked to attach your Data Management Plan to your ethics application. Your plan will be used to identify the support you require, and to make sure that sufficient storage and archival space will be available when you need it.

You can access the template for doctoral research projects as an online form via DMPOnline. When you are creating a new plan in DMPOnline, please leave the field for “research funder” blank, and choose the SHU Template for Doctoral Students., as shown in the image below.

 

If you have never used DMPOnline before, see the explanation on how to get started with DMPOnline on this page, which shows you how to create an account on DMPOnline.

As an alternative to using DMPOnline, you can download a PDF  or Word version of the generic template for a Data Management plan including SHU specific guidance.

Doctoral template – Alternatively, you can download a PDF version of the Data Management Plan for Doctoral Research Projects or a Word document.

• You will find examples of data management plans on the DCC website.
• The University of Bristol also has sample data management plans for each of the seven UKRI (formerly RCUK) funding agencies.
• DMPOnline contains example answers taken from previous data management plans written by SHU researchers.
• There are a variety of examples available from Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) –  an open access journal that publishes research ideas and outcomes that constitute the research cycle.
• For SHU staff only – find examples of data management plans and statements written by SHU researchers. Doctoral students can request examples from Library Research Support.

Informative videos from MRC

• Writing a DMP for the MRC
• Advice on writing Data Management Plans
• Including costs in Data Management Plans

Checklists

• SHU Data Management Plan Checklist
• The Digital Curation Centre’s checklist for a data management plan is useful for all projects
• The UK Data Archive’s Data Management Checklist is useful if you are working in the social sciences

Training

• Data management plans is an interactive online training module from the MANTRA Project