Data management plans (DMPs) capture your intended process for gathering, curating, and storing your research data. While DMPs are Intended to be living documents, altered as the need arises throughout a research project, this page lists the types of information typically included in a DMP.
Questions listed below are drawn from Portage's ‘DMP Assistant Tool’. When you are ready fill out your DMP, the Assistant will provide a template to follow and complete with examples to clarify the process,
Data collection
- What types of data will you collect, create, link to, acquire and/or record?
- What file formats will your data be collected in? Will these formats allow for data re-use, sharing and long-term access to the data?
- What conventions and procedures will you use to structure, name and version-control your files to help you and others better understand how your data are organized?
Documentation and metadata
- What documentation will be needed for the data to be read and interpreted correctly in the future?
- How will you ensure this documentation is created or captured consistently throughout your project?
- If you are using a metadata standard and/or tools to document and describe your data, list it.
Storage and backup
- What are the anticipated storage requirements for your project, in terms of storage space (in megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, etc.) and the length of time you will be storing it?
- How and where will your data be stored and backed up during your research project?
- How will the research team and other collaborators access, modify, and contribute data throughout the project?
Preservation
- Where will you deposit your data for long-term preservation and access at the end of your research project?
- Indicate how you will ensure your data is preservation ready. Consider preservation-friendly file formats, ensuring file integrity, anonymization and de-identification, inclusion of supporting documentation.
Sharing and reuse
- What data will can you share and in what form? (e.g. raw, processed, analyzed, final).
- Have you considered what type of end-user license to include with your data?
- What steps will be taken to help the research community know that your data exists?
Responsibilities and resources
- Identify who will be responsible for managing this project's data during and after the project and the major data management tasks for which they will be responsible.
- How will responsibilities for managing data activities be handled if substantive changes happen in the personnel overseeing the project's data, including a change of Principal Investigator?
- What resources will you require to implement your data management plan? What do you estimate the overall cost for data management to be?
Ethics and legal compliance
- If your research project includes sensitive data, how will you ensure that it is securely managed and accessible only to approved members of the project?
- If applicable, what strategies will you undertake to address secondary uses of sensitive data?
- How will you manage legal, ethical, and intellectual property issues?
