Plan your research with a data Management Plan (DMP)

What is a Data Management Plan (DMP)? 

Presentation video

DMPs are increasingly required by funders (H2020, ERC, FWO, etc.), mostly as early as in the research proposal. It is often seen as an additional administrative load with limited importance, but it as many advantages throughout a research project:

1. This is the backbone of your research project that will guide all its organization.
2. You and your research partners can always refer to it. It provides a common, written understanding of every step of the project. For example
   1. It gives common guidelines for data collection
   2. It helps answering ethical and legal requirements
   3. It provides common guidelines for file naming, and database structure, as well as data quality assessment.
   4. It plans data secure storage facilities and strategies. It improves risk management, and avoids data losses
   5. It makes you think about data sharing, and how to organize it beforehand
3. By setting everyone’s responsibility it helps to deal with a researcher’s leave.
4. While it is written at the beginning of the project, it can always be upgraded during the project.

The best advantage is that, once settled at the beginning of the project, it makes you save time at later stages. On the one hand, you can refer to it during the project, so that procedures just have to be followed. On the other hand, this is a useful basic to write reports, or methods in a paper.

Depending on the research project’s funder, you will have to fill in different templates of DMPs.

Horizon Europe – European Commission

Openaire website has several webpages dedicated to completion of DMPs for European Commission projects.

• DMP creation 
• Plan data management cost 
• Factsheets for Horizon projects 
• Use of data in European projects 

Examples of DMPs:

• Several disciplines and funders 
• For earth science 

Go further: best practices to fill in DMPs section

DMPs contain several sections to fill in, with appropriate guidance (see the section about DMPonline.be).  Yet, you will find guidance on the following sections on Dataone website:

• Describe the research project
• Define and describe data 
• Describe measurments techniques 
• Describe data quality procedures 
• Create and describe a data backup policy 
• Create and describe storage  
• Define roles and responsibilities 

See also our website pages for guidelines on these topics.