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.