Research Data Management Guide: Data Management Planning

Good research data management practices ensure that researchers and institutions are able to meet their obligations to funders, improve the efficiency of research, and ensure data is findable, accessible, interoperable, trusted, and reusable. Research data management is a joint responsibility between researchers and institutions. That is why it’s important to understand what institutions need to consider when formulating data management frameworks and strategies.  (Australian Research Data Commons)

This video is part of MANTRA, the Research Data Management free online course created by the University of Edinburgh Data Library: http://mantra.edina.ac.uk.

Making data more discoverable:

• Enables the demonstration of research excellence
• Allows researchers to build upon existing data, instead of recreating it
• Fosters innovation
• Provides the ability to solve big problems across discipline boundaries

Reusing data allows:

• Verification of research claims
• New discoveries from existing data
• Integration of sets of data for new analysis
• Re-analysis of expensive, rare or unrepeatable investigations
• The reduction of duplicated effort

A Data Management Plan (DMP) explains "how you look after your data throughout your project. It covers planning, collecting, organising, managing, storage, security, backing up, preserving, and sharing your data and ensures that research data are managed according to legal, statutory, ethical and funding body requirements." (Whyte, A. & Tedds, J., 2011) 

It is good practice to create a DMP for any research project. It can help researchers document every stage of research data lifecycle.

CDU Research Data Management Plan Template: This template is informed by the requirements for managing research data as set out in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, CDU Responsible Conduct of Research Policy, and Charles Darwin University Research Data Management Procedures.

Research Data MANTRA is a free online course designed for research students and early career researchers, providing guidelines for good practice in research data management.

For further information and resources on research data management, you may like to have a look at the support pages of some other Australian universities:

• Curtin University
• Monash University
• University of Newcastle
• University of Queensland