Data Management Components

A data management plan is a formal, living 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. The goal of a data management plan is to consider the many aspects of data management, metadata generation, data preservation, and analysis before the project begins; this should lead to data being well-managed in the present and prepared for preservation in the future.

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.