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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Signing up for an account:
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: