Data Management Plans Required by Federal Grant Funding Agencies
A data management plan is a formal document that outlines what a grant project will do with its data during and after the project. The plan describes the data that will be created, the standards used to describe the data (metadata), who owns the data, who can access the data, how long the data will be preserved (and/or made accessible), and what facilities and equipment will be necessary to disseminate, share, and/or preserve the data.
Many (but not all) federal funding agencies require data management plans as part of a grant proposal application. Persons seeking to make a grant application to a federal funding source should ascertain what the data management plan requirements are and ensure that the grant proposal provides the required data management plan details.
Here are some examples of data management plan requirements:
National Institutes of Health
“The NIH expects and supports the timely release and sharing of final research data from NIH-supported studies for use by other researchers. …[I]nvestigators submitting an NIH application seeking $500,000 or more in direct costs in any single year are expected to include a plan for data sharing or state why data sharing is not possible.”
Link to additional information: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/data_sharing_guidance.htm
National Science Foundation
“Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants. Grantees are expected to encourage and facilitate such sharing.”
“Proposals submitted to NSF must include a supplementary document of no more than two pages labeled ‘Data Management Plan’. This supplementary document should describe how the proposal will conform to NSF policy on the dissemination and sharing of research results.”
Link to additional information: http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/dmp.jsp
National Endowment for the Humanities
Generally, the NEH grant programs do not have an explicit data management requirement. One exception is the Digital Humanities Implementation Grant program:
“The data management plan (DMP) should be short (no more than two pages) and will be submitted as a document supplementing a grant application. The plan will need to address two main topics: (1) What data are generated by your research? (2) What is your plan for managing the data?”
“The data management plan will be evaluated as part of each proposal. Proposals must include sufficient information to enable peer reviewers to assess an applicant’s data management plan. The plan should reflect best practices in the applicant’s area of research, and it should be appropriate to the data that the project will generate. The plan should describe how the project team will manage and disseminate data generated by the project. NEH will also require the grantee to discuss compliance with the DMP in post-award reports.”
Link to additional information: http://www.neh.gov/content/data-management-plans-pdf
Guidance on the development of data management plans
As a first step, contact the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs for guidance on the development of the particular data management plans details that will be required for submission of the grant project. The Associate Provost will involve other University officials as necessary (such as the CIO and the University Librarian) in the development and review of any proposed data management plan before the grant project is submitted.
Here is one example of a recently-developed data management plan submitted as part of a UMW NSF grant proposal.