A Data Management Plan (DMP) is a short document which explains to your funder and to your collaborators how you intend to manage your research data during and after your grant funding period. Writing a DMP should not be seen as an administrative burden but rather an opportunity to convince your funder that you have a strategy for managing research data responsibly. What research data will you create? How will you guarantee your research data is stored safely? How will you protect personal data? How will you store large volumes of research data? Where might you publish the research data which supports your findings? You will propose solutions to some of these questions in your DMP.
UKRI has written Guidance on best practice in the management of research data. This is essential reading for all researchers even if your funder is not UKRI. At the end of the UKRI guidance, there is a DMP template which describes what you need to include in your DMP. Please read this valuable guidance.
After reading the guidance, you should write your DMP using the DMPonline tool. The tool includes published DMPs but you will need to filter the list by funder because there are too many DMPs to scan. You can also read a sample of DMPs written by other Durham researchers; these appear under 'Durham University plans' on your dashboard in DMPonline.
Please follow these steps to write your plan:
A typical DMP has the following structure:
European funding bodies will typically ask you to describe your research data and to answer questions about the F.A.I.R. data principles.
Data created or collected |
Data type |
Data format |
Volume or Duration |
Planned storage and access |
---|---|---|---|---|
Raw ethnographic field notes | Notebooks | Paper | n/a | No shared access |
Photographs | Digital images | JPEG | 100 photographs * 4 Mb each = ca. 400 Mb | OneDrive for Business |
Interviews | Sound recordings | MP3 | 20 interviews, ca. 30 minutes each. 20 * ca. 42 Mb = ca. 840 Mb in total. (Assumes recording at a bitrate of 192 kbps.) | Destroyed after transcription |
Transcriptions | Documents | Word | 20 documents, < 5 Mb each. Total: < 100 Mb | Anonymised transcripts to be published in the Durham research data repository |
Magma flows | X-ray images | Tiff | 50 Tb storage per year for five years = 250 Tb total storage | Shared Research Storage (**) |
Project web site | Wordpress |
HTML, CSS, Javascript |
Web site will be publicly available during the whole project lifecycle and 3 years after the project finishes. | Public |
Qualitative data file | Analysis of interviews stored in MAXQDA | We will export data from MAXQDA in Excel format | Data will be stored within MAXQDA during the whole project lifecycle. Requires 2 Gb storage |
An edited, anonymised and de-identified version of the data will be deposited in the Durham Research Data Repository. |
These column headings are for illustration purposes only. You will need to think of meaningful column headings for your research project.
(**) You should ask your funder to contribute in whole or in part to SRS storage costs. You will need to choose an appropriate CIS storage tier for your project: Gold tier or Silver tier.