Data Management Components
A data management plan is a formal document that outlines what you will do with your data during and after you complete your research. Different funders may call the document a data sharing plan, a data archiving plan, or a technical plan.
There are multiple components to consider when formulating a plan, including:
- Where and how to archive and share data
- For a quick overview on Selecting a Data Sharing Repository check out these slides.
- For information on preserving your research data for future reuse, check out these slides on Data Preservation.
- Why and how to cite data
- Data privacy & copyright and intellectual property rights
- For a quick overview on Why you should apply a license to your data check out these slides.
- And for more detailed information on licensing, check out Which License Should I Apply to My Data?
- Documenting the data
- For a quick overview on Documentation and Metadata check out these slides.
- And for more detailed information on unstructured documentation, check out Documentation and Metadata
- And for more detailed information on structured documentation (metadata), check out our Metadata for data slides.
- File Formats and Data Types
- Check out a video created by one of our interns describing different data types.
- Organizing files and tracking changes
- check out these slides, for a quick overview on Data Collection and Spreadsheets .
- And for detailed information on file and directory naming, check out slides on File-Directory-Organization
- And for more detailed information on quality assurance and file transformations, check out our slides on QA and Transformations.
- Data Security and Encryption
- Data Security is the protection of data from unauthorized access, use, change, disclosure and destruction.
- Encryption offers protection by scrambling data, so only the owner of the key or password can read the data.
- Passwords
- Data Storage and backups
- For a quick overview on Best Practices for storing and securing your data check out these slides.
To learn more, visit our Research Data Management Guide.