Data Management Plans

The new NIH Policy for Data Management & Sharing goes into effect January 25, 2023. Additionally, the White House has mandated that all federally funded research includes open data by the end of 2025.

A Data Management Plan is a formal document that outlines how you will handle data during and after your research. 

Even if your funding source does not require a data management plan, learning to organize and manage your data for long-term use can have a number of positive impacts, including:

• It saves you time in the long run.
• Provides better access to data after students and collaborators leave.
• Preserves your data in the long-term for you and future researchers working with that data.

And when you make your data open to others, positive impacts include:

• New possibilities for scholarly research.  As curation of data becomes recognized as a scholarly activity, there are more opportunities for scholarly publication.
• Making it easier for other researchers to verify/replicate your results which aids the scientific method.
• Reusing of the data by researchers in other fields that might otherwise not have access to the data. For example, an environmental data set that is helpful to urban planners.

This guide provides links to tools and resources to help you design a data management plan appropriate to your needs and funding source.  It also includes links to repositories where you can deposit data.