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Research Data Management: Data Management Plan (DMP)

The Research Data Management Portal is designed to provide guidance, best practices, and resources on the steps within the research data lifecycle and its correlation to the requirements of established data management practices.

What is a Data Management Plan (DMP)?

What is a Data Management Plan (DMP)?

A Data Management Plan or DMP is a narrative living document which describes the deliberate planning, creation, storage, access, and preservation of data produced from a given investigation.

​A DMP should be created during the project planning phase and is designed to help you think through all of your data externalizes and dependencies, as well as plan for access, storage, sharing, and preservation. 

Table. Column 1: Reactive Actions (repository ingestion; access and reuse; preservation/migration; format migration; disposition). Column 2: Proactive Actions (standards workflows = file naming; data management & training = DMPs (living document); robust documentation = Readme and codes; controlled vocabularies = data dictionaries; metadata standards = choose & publicize; persistent identifiers = DOI, ORCID, ROR; preservation planning = repository & backups).By implementing data management strategies at the time of data creation we can improve data preservation outcomes for years or decades in the future. Approaching data curation and preservation for legacy or already existing datasets, are reactive actions that usually suffer from incomplete knowledge or information due to limited documentation. These outcomes can be improved by taking proactive actions and planning for long-term data preservation and sharing from the beginning of a project.

By following the proactive actions throughout a research project the end result will be a robust data package that can be preserved and reused in the future. 

 

A Living Document

A DMP is a Living Document

The DMP is a major part of the documentation that needs to take place throughout the research project. By documenting the project's planning process you can ensure that an organized system is established that makes all knowledge and information explicit. This will ensure that both you and others can understand the data, when visiting it in the future.

Although initially created during the planning phase, a DMP should be thought of as a living document and reviewed as frequently as necessary, and updated to capture every project change that is made.

  • During the planning phase, this might include a review at every team meeting: questioning did we change anything that affects the DMP? And noting those changes.
  • During data collection, that might be monthly, or at other key milestones.  
  • During data analysis, that might be quarterly.
  • After publication, the review might be annual, to catch IT infrastructure changes.
  • Then while the data is archived, it might be every few years.

The most up-to-date version of the DMP should be accessible to all project staff during the life of the project, to ensure changes are documented as they happen. 

Finally, when the project comes to an end a final public version of your DMP should be included as part of the final data package when the data is shared or made public. This public version can be redacted a bit, if needed, for public consumption. 

Writing a DMP

Things to Consider: When Writing a DMP. Project Lead (Who takes over? Who owns intellectual property?); Staff; Types of data to be collected and when the data will be collected; Who will collect data? How will data be collected (by humans or machines)?; File Formats; Standardized file naming conventions; File sizes (expected or estimated); Data Access Levels; How data will be anatomized to protect sensitive information (if needed); Chosen data repository for public access; Link to repository policies (retention, preservation, PIDs, etc.); and Organizational IT contacts, policies, laws, IRB rules that impact the project.

The types of information you should make explicit can go on. The point is to record everything you can think of, documenting information project staff need to know, and looking for weak spots that would put the data, the project, or subjects at risk. Then fix the plan to eliminate that risk.

DMPTool

DMPTool: Making best practice easier
 
DMPTool can guide you through the creation of a data management plan that will meet your Funder's requirements. DMPTool is widely used by researchers at institutions around the U.S.
 

Signing up for an account:

  • In order to access the DMPTool you will first need to create an account, if you don’t already have one. To do this you will need to first navigate to the site’s homepage at https://dmptool.org. On the right side of the screen, there will be a section called “Sign in / Sign up” and below there will be a place to type in your email address.
    • This does look the same regardless of whether you already have an account or not. If you don’t have an account after clicking on the “Continue” button or enter on the keyboard you will be taken to the “New Account Sign Up” screen. Your email address will already be filled out and you will need to type your first name, last name, institution, and finally create a password. Once you have filled out all the required information you need to click the box beside “I accept the terms and conditions” which will show as a blue filled-in box with a white checkmark. After this, you will click the “Sign up” button or enter on the keyboard and your account will be created.
  • If you do have an account, after putting in your email address and clicking on the “Continue” button or hitting enter on the keyboard you will be taken to another “Sign in” screen where your email is already filled out and you will just need to add your password and then click the “Sign in” button or enter on the keyboard.

Then after an account is created you can easily select the relevant template for you, from a list of funding organizations and their templates, and then start writing your own DMP. The DMPTool also allows for easy collaboration among team members to ensure the latest version is being updated. 

The sections of a DMP can vary from organization to organization, so it is important to first check and see if the funding organization has a prepared template for you to follow. This is another benefit to using the DMPTool, because many funding organizations have begun to use it to help streamline the process and easily make their templates available online for researchers. 

Current Templates Available under DOT:

Examples of DMPs