Nature: "Data management made simple"

Andy

Retired committee member
Not the most thrilling of articles but perhaps someone could send this to QMUL, I'm sure they could benefit from it?? ;)
Data management is one example of the way in which public research sponsors and research institutions are implementing ‘open science’, the push to make scientific research and data freely accessible. Many funding agencies have made data-management plans mandatory for grant applicants in the past decade or so. All US federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have such policies. Data-management plans must also now be included in grant proposals to the European Research Council and other European Union-funded research programmes. And many national funding agencies in Europe — including the UK research councils and the London-based Wellcome Trust, world’s largest biomedical research charity — also ask for data plans.

Many scientists already practise data management by default. Astronomers, for example, have been doing so for decades when calibrating their observations and archiving huge amounts of telescope-survey data in standardized, machine-readable catalogues for reuse.

Where can I get help?

The University of California Curation Center, part of the CDL, and the Digital Curation Centre in Edinburgh, UK, provide examples of data-management plans written by researchers from various fields. The centres also provide online tools for writing data-management plans that meet the demands of most funding organizations in both countries. Versions of the tools are also available for scientists in several other European countries, as well as for those in Australia, Canada and South Africa.

Simms recommends that grant applicants who are unfamiliar with open-data provisions consult funding-agency programme officers about any field-specific requirements. For more technical guidance, on requirements for machine readability of data protocols, say, or on file formats used by institutional data repositories, scientists should consult their host institute’s digital library services, she adds.
 
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