Writing Data Management Plans

This case study was written by Dr Vashti Galpin, 2024 Researcher-in-Residence, DRS, and Senior Researcher, School of Informatics.

EPSRC is one of the few funders that do not require the submission of a Data Management Plan (DMP) when applying for grants, although data management remains central to the core principles of their Policy Framework on Research Data. Principle 5 states that "Institutional and project-specific data management policies and plans should be in accordance with relevant standards and community best practices and should exist for all data. Data with acknowledged long-term value should be preserved, and remain accessible and usable for future research". Moreover, the University of Edinburgh requires data management plans for all projects that use or collect data, as described in the Research Data Management Policy.

These requirements, as well the benefits gained from thinking data management through in advance of a project, makes writing a DMP a very useful exercise, but with some challenges.

The university subscribes to DMPOnline, a web-based tool for writing DMPs. It offers an EPSRC template that asks a number of useful questions around:

While these questions may be easy to interpret as questions about datasets (e.g. files of numerical quantities), their application to other digital objects that occur in a research project in the engineering and physical sciences such as software developed during a project is much less obvious.

Using the advice from the Software Sustainability Institute, a DMP was developed which received positive feedback from the Research Data Service during their review process (this review process is available to all researchers in the University).

This data management plan (DMP) was originally written in conjunction with a Computer Science research project where EPSRC Responsive Mode funding was applied for. The plan has been modified to remove some of the details of the research and people involved but still addresses the main issues.

You can access the DMP through DMPOnline here (requires login).

For publications and other outputs by the author, please visit here (Orcid) or Edinburgh Research Explorer.