A data management plan is a document developed at the beginning of a research project and updated throughout that describes:
- What research data you will be creating or collecting.
- Who will be responsible for each aspect of the management plan you are developing.
- What policies (funding, institutional, and legal) will apply to your data.
- How the data will be organised (folder structures, file naming conventions, file versioning).
- How the data will be documented during the collection and analysis phase of your research.
- What data management practices (backups, storage, access control, archiving) you will use to store & secure your data.
- What facilities and equipment will be required (hard-disk space, backup server, repository).
- Who will have ownership and access rights to your data.
- How the data will be preserved and made available in the long term once your research is completed.
EDINA and Data Library, University of Edinburgh. Research Data MANTRA. http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra.
