Data Management Planning

You should describe the standards you will use when managing and publishing your data. This will include your intended metadata format. Many standards are available and often focus on the needs of specific disciplines. The standard chosen is less important than the fact that it should be fit-for-purpose, i.e., capable of documenting your data to a degree of detail that will support re-use by an investigator not involved in the original research. Example: “Metadata are encoded in the xxxxxx metadata standard. This flexible metadata standard is well established, being widely accepted across multiple disciplines. The research team for this project will provide complete metadata for each dataset to be archived to maximize the potential re-use of data. Metadata files are versioned to reflect updates or corrections to both the data and/or the metadata.”

Policies for access and sharing including provisions for appropriate protection of privacy, confidentiality, security, intellectual property, or other rights or requirements. Example: “Based on a history of collaboration with the other institutions, we have adopted as a standard across all projects, a two-tiered data-access policy, with most data being made publicly available. Only copyright-protected, third-party data and selected human subject data are not public. Some human subject datasets, however, will be stripped of identifying information and made publicly available through the Arizona State University institutional data repository. Investigator- and student-supplied data are normally made available to the public within two years of project completion to allow time for the collation, verification, and publication of research results. If the project produces any non-public data (due to licensing restrictions or privacy protection), they are available to our researchers via read access to the data archives on resilient storage media, through individual database access, or via custom queries requested through the project team.”

Policies and provisions for re-use, re-distribution, and the production of derivatives. Example: “The data and information derived from this research will be made available for re-use after publication in an internet accessible data repository. These data will be downloadable with limited restrictions and with attention to accurate and complete metadata. Researchers using these data will be requested to cite the data appropriately, including the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and research funding source.”

You should ensure that you detail the plans you have for archiving data, samples, and other research products, and how you will preserve access to them. Example: “By default, data are published via the Arizona State University Digital Repository, a web-based portal that accesses metadata and datasets from several underlying data repositories. This data portal has a comprehensive search interface, allowing users to find and download data from a wide range of projects. Tabular data are presented to the user as comma-separated value files (CSV); a format selected because of its portable nature and format durability. Spatial data are supplied in their native form as compressed packages to reduce transmission requirements. In addition to this data source, published data may also be presented via independent discipline-specific repositories.”