Title: Data management planning
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Beyond data collection and analysis

Data management planning

Data management should be considered from the outset of the research process. It is a good, and indeed for many funders a required, practice to produce a data management plan. A data management plan sets forth our plans for the creation, organisation, documentation and the storing and sharing of our data.

More specifically, a data management plan may include the following details:

1 | What data is to be collected; what policies will apply to the data
2 | What data management practices are to be used, for example, backups, access control and archiving
3 | The facilities and equipment necessary to manage the data, for example, hard disk space and a backup server
4 | Ownership and access rights to the data
5 | Who has responsibility for the various tasks involved in managing the data
6 | The significance of the data beyond the scope of the original research
7 | How the data will be preserved and facilitation of its reuse.

Whilst produced at the outset of the research process, a data management plan is not set in stone and should be updated throughout the research process.

Data management plans are living documents to be maintained and kept up-to-date throughout the course of research. A web-based tool to help researchers create data management plans is available at DMP Online, a service provided by the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC). Another tool is MANTRA.