Research data management

Research data management plans

A data management plan describes how you will collect, organise, manage, store, secure, back- up, preserve, and where applicable, share your research data. A data management plan should be created at the start of a research project so that good practices are established early. Good data management requires forward planning.

 
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Some of the benefits of research data management planning:

• Issues and strategies are identified early in your research project
• Compliance with institutional and funder policies and ethics approval requirements are documented
• Data sharing and reuse opportunities of your research data
• Research data remains useful and stored safely for future use

Checklist for a data management plan

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) provides a checklist of questions to be considered when writing your data management plan. The questions relate to the following:

• Data collection
• Ethics and legal compliance
• Storage and backup
• Selection and preservation
• Data sharing
• Responsibilities and resources