Planning
Why is planning of research data management useful?
Data management planning is not only for meeting expectations and policies of institutions and funding agencies. If you start in the beginning of your project with data management planning,
- you can assign responsabilities and roles for data management in your team.
- you can budget needed infrastructure, services, legal issues, and costs (sometimes reimbursable by your funder).
- you save time and resources in the long run and increase research efficiency.
- you prevent loss of data by enhancing data security.
- you avoid unnecessary data dublication through well-arranged data organisation.
- with a good data organisation and communication you enable continuity if things change and new employees need to find quickly what they are looking for.
- you can define the visibility and the outreach of your research data through data publication.
- you enable reproducibility and verifiability of your research.
You should consider the Data Management Plan (DMP) as a checklist that helps to plan things, that will come up later in the research process. On the following pages you find helpful hints and links supporting you in writing your DMP and in organising and documenting your data.