Responsible research matters: Data management planning and DMP Online

All researchers want to produce excellent research. Planning how to manage your data really helps, particularly when most funders require that research proposals include a data management plan or statement. This allows reviewers to see that researchers understand how to assure the quality of their research and avoid data loss.

Data loss can take many forms, and in extreme cases can cost significant time and money to correct. Creating a data management plan helps to set up processes to avoid data loss and formalise your practice for audit and assurance purposes.

A data management plan will usually cover the full data lifecycle, from the planning stage through analysis and write up to preservation and reuse. This allows you to consider how workflows at the start of the process could impact on the end of the process and vice versa.

Areas covered include the types and amounts of data produced, storage and back up of data, as well as preservation and sharing. This helps you think about where you will store your data and whether you need access to more space, but also what policy and legislation impacts on your research.

There are a lot of different data management plan templates. Funders have individual templates that address their particular concerns. However, it is fair to say that most templates cover a similar set of themes, just with different emphases.

A good data management plan is a live document. As your research project unfolds, you may discover new information, technologies and methodologies that lead you down paths you couldn’t anticipate at the start of the process. Updating a data management plan to reflect changes to improve practice is a strength not a weakness.

DMP Online is a tool that makes creating, editing and sharing data management plans easy. You can access the service with your university username and password.

The tool includes a range of templates, covering many of the major funders in the UK and Europe. For those who are unfunded, we have added a template for the university. This is a generic template covering the main areas of data management based on the commonly occurring sections in funder templates. We also include guidance in filling out specific sections and point towards local policy and resource that will help.

While based online, the tool offers you several options for sharing and exporting plans, meaning that you can easily keep older versions of your plan as word documents or PDFs, and keep the document live. You can invite others to contribute, if working in a team, or can grant read access to people who might need to review your plan.

We have a webpage with more detail on writing a data management plan.

We also have a short video on DMP Online to introduce you to the service.