2 An Overview of Data Management Planning

A Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMS Plan) is a short document (~2 pages) that describes your plans for collecting, organizing, storing, and eventually disseminating the data that underlies your published research. Writing a DMS Plan gives you the opportunity to develop a framework for organizing and managing your research data over the lifecycle of the project, and think through various data-related issues that might arise; committing to a plan in writing will help you to approach data management in a deliberate and intentional way, rather than figuring things out as you go in an ad-hoc fashion. Ultimately, this increases the likelihood that research results will be reproducible, and that the data products which underpin these results will be reusable by the scholarly community.

Data Mannagement and Sharing Plans are therefore increasingly required by funding agencies as a part of grant applications, and have been a requirement for NSF grant applications for some time now. One of the key features of the NIH’s new Data Management and Sharing Policy is that a Data Management and Sharing Plan will now be a requirement for NIH grants as well.

You can access the template for the NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan on this NIH website. This page also contains a number of useful sample plans that use the NIH DMS Plan template. If you are familiar with NSF data management plans, you’ll notice that the NIH DMS Plan template is quite similar (though not identical).

If you are planning to apply for an NIH grant, the easiest way to generate an appropriate data management and sharing plan that conforms to NIH requirements is to use an application called DMPTool, which is a digital platform that provides structured assistance to researchers that would like to craft data management plans. DMPTool provides data management plan templates for a variety of major funders, including the NIH. It also allows you to view sample plans that have been completed in the past. A particularly helpful feature of DMPTool is that it allows for easy collaboration among project teams, including among project teams that are dispersed across multiple institutions.

Below, Section 3 walks you through the main steps involved in creating a Data Management and Sharing Plan for your NIH grant applications using DMPTool.