Under the new GDPR legislation, when gaining individual consent from participants for gathering your data you will now need to include a Privacy Notice with your ethical consent material. See GDPR Guidelines for Researchers for further information.
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.
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
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.
Create an account with DMPonline
Use DMPonline for your Doctoral Thesis data management plan
Alternatively, fill out a template in Word or PDF
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.
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:
How to create a new 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.
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.
Doctoral template – Alternatively, you can download a PDF version of the Data Management Plan for Doctoral Research Projects or a Word document.
Checklists
Training