Data Management

Many key organizations providing funding for research require the submission of a data management plan as part of the grant application process to ensure the sharing of  data.  Sharing data increases the likelihood of a study being cited, as well as expanding the impact of the study itself.  Additional benefits from sharing data include:

• encouraging scientific inquiry and debate
• promoting innovation and potential new data uses
• developing new collaborations between data users and data collectors
• maximizing transparency and accountability
• enabling the scrutinization of research findings
• encouraging the improvement and validation of research methods
• reducing the cost of duplicating data collection
• providing credit to the researcher as a research output in its own right
• providing great resources for education and training

Under the "Getting Started" tab are resources to help researchers identify in detail what to consider and where to begin when developing a data management plan.