Data Management Plan

This week, ORDE offered a seminar on Data Management in which Shea Swauger, our Head of Research Support Services at the Auraria Library discussed the ins and outs of data management and what to include in a data management plan. All of this was offered in light of the demand by major funding agencies to include a data management plan in their grant applications.

Below are some of the things that PIs should consider as they put together their data management plan.

Storage
As you consider data storage for your project, be sure to identify all of the different sorts of data you will be producing and consider the amount of data that you think you are going to generate. Also, consider security and access needs that you have and how best to back up the data you are generating. Shea suggested that if your institution can't offer you storage to meet your needs, some cloud options could be the most cost effective and usable solutions. Specifically, he recommended Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Organization
When you're spending your days immersed in your data - gathering, cleaning, analyzing, etc. - your organization feels so natural. However, it's amazing how quickly you can forget what this category was for or what that file name meant. This is why it's a good idea to incorporate metadata. Metadata can be as simple as just incorporating notes to yourself as to what you meant by this or that.

Preservation
Once you've analyzed your data and published your results, what do you do with your data? With increasing demands by national agencies to preserve raw data and to make your research reproducible, it's important that you have a plan to preserve your data. Shea offered a couple of solutions for preserving data, including the new Auraria Institutional Repository or you can find an appropriate data depository at this site.

Dissemination
There is a call from funding agencies for PIs to share their data and make it possible for their research to be reproducible. So, important to your data management plan is the component that outlines your plan for dissemination. More and more, sponsors see data dissemination as a requirement for funding. As you develop your grant proposal, make sure you have a clear understanding of the agency's requirements and recommendations for dissemination and be sure to meet those in your data management plan.

It can seem like a burden to lay out your data management plan at the outset of a project, but not only will a good data management plan make you more competitive for funding, it will save you headaches in the future.

Resources
Data Management Planning Tool - University of California
Data Q