Writing Data Management Plan During Grant Application

In addition to other essential grant application requirements, funders increasingly require applicants to submit a data management plan (DMP).

The grant proposal can be viewed as a preliminary draft of a comprehensive data management plan. According to the European Commission’s Horizon 2020, project data must be freely accessible to promote data sharing and ethical data management by researchers.

Data Management Plan is a detailed supplementary document that explains the rationale for choosing specific formats, approaches, standards, and methods for your project.

The main objective of the data management plan is to describe the types of data generated, their management, and their availability and accessibility to other researchers.

For starters, creating a data management plan is so important that some funding agencies do not accept proposals that do not include one.

Required to create a data management plan that supports data reuse beyond the project lifecycle.

Although there is no official template for creating a DMP, a grant applicant must address the key elements mentioned below:

This is a brief description of the information provided collect. In this section should include the amount of data to be generated, their nature, and the type of data that needs to be generated and collected during the project.

The types of data that need to be included in this section are text, educational materials, spreadsheets, images, 3D models, software, audio files, video files, field observation reports, surveys, review files, etc. Last but not least, you must cite and give due credit while incorporating data that has been published by others.

This section includes a description of the format of your data and how it will be created, collected, stored, and distributed.

Additionally, it includes the rationale for any procedural and storage implications of the formats.

Additionally, you must include measures taken to comply with the project’s testing procedures.

The storage and preservation section addresses the long-term strategy for maintaining, preserving, and archiving data. It must include storage methods, backup procedures, and resources for retrieving research data.

You must indicate where your data will be kept (name the repository, archive, or database).

Also, mention the procedures your planned long-term storage location must maintain. It is necessary to specify the retention period for data that will be accessible beyond the lifetime of the project.

This section describes technical and procedural safeguards for information containing sensitive information and how permissions, restrictions, etc. are applied. Additionally, you need to specify when and how the data can be accessed. This section should address the following issues:

The ethics and privacy section of the data management plan describes how the applicant plans to handle informed consent and how the privacy of that data will be protected. All precautions should be included, such as: B. Protect participant confidentiality or other ethical issues that may arise.

This section must include information from the natural or legal person who owns the intellectual property rights in the data. Similarly, the measures taken to protect these intellectual property rights and copyright restrictions should also be clearly stated.

In your data management plan, it is important to identify who will be responsible for data management. These people play a critical role, are responsible for data management during the project, and should have information about version control, naming conventions, etc.

Do not confuse the budget portion of your data management plan with the budget portion of your funding request. This includes the cost of preparing data and documents for archiving. • Check preferred formats while depositing your data in discipline or institutional archives. • All collaborative proposals or sub-awards are treated as a unified project. Hence, they must be combined in a single data management plan. Although a supplementary document, we know that data management plan can have a strong impact on the acceptance of your grant proposal. Did this help you in understanding the nuances of writing a data management plan? How have you been structuring your DMPs? Let us know in the comments section below! You can also visit our Q&A forum for frequently asked questions related to different aspects of research writing and publishing answered by our team that comprises subject-matter experts, eminent researchers, and publication experts.