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What to consider in your DMP

An essential part of your DMP is outlining who'll be responsible for data management activities and ensuring that relevant policies and legislation will be followed. It's crucial that roles and responsibilities are assigned and not just presumed. Consider: 

• who'll assume overall responsibility for implementing the DMP and each of the individual activities set out in the plan
• how responsibilities will be split in collaborative research projects
• who'll be identified as the project’s data steward.

Project members

The lists the project members who may be involved in RDM:

• The project director or principal investigators designing and overseeing the research
• Research staff designing research, collecting, processing and analysing data, thereby taking account where data will be held and who'll have access
• Laboratory or technical staff generating metadata and documentation; a database designer
• External contractors involved in data collection, data entry, transcribing, processing and/or analysis, where standard protocols should be agreed in advance and documented
• Support staff managing and administering research and research funding, providing ethical review and assessing intellectual property rights
• Institutional IT services staff providing data storage, security and backup services
• External data centres or web archives that facilitate data sharing

Responsibilities

Data management responsibilities should be set out in your DMP. The principal investigator will typically retain overall responsibility, but they may delegate specific tasks. This could include data collection, anonymisation, or creation of documentation. Individuals should be named and assigned responsibilities in the DMP where possible.

Data steward

A data steward is a common role assigned in a research project. A steward is usually a person employed in any role by the University who is identified as being responsible for the management of a specific set of research data for the purposes of continuity.

The data steward should have enough knowledge of the dataset to respond to any future access requests where the data is available only under a certain set of conditions.

Who you identify as the data steward will depend on the nature of the research project and team. For example, the role may be undertaken by: 

• a senior researcher
• data curator
• project officer
• research technician.

Postgraduate researchers and supervisors

PGR students are primarily responsible for RDM practices within their project. However, supervisors are responsible for ensuring that students are aware of, and conduct research in accordance with, related policies and legislation, and are adequately trained in good RDM practice. 

Students should consider long-term access and continuity of research data after have completion of their programme. In certain scenarios, the supervisor may be best placed to act as the project’s long-term data steward.

Resources

Additional resources may be required to deliver your plan; these should be documented and justified.

Consider: 

• additional hardware or software requirements
• staff time e.g. employing a dedicated data steward
• costs of preparing data for deposit
• active storage of large datasets
• any charges for data repositories. 

Collaborative research

Research projects are commonly undertaken in partnership with individuals and organisations external to the University. This can create additional data management challenges around data storage and sharing which should be addressed in your DMP.

You should also review any and partnership agreements in detail. These agreements are likely to include an intellectual property (IP) clause which specify where ownership of arising IP will reside. Make sure to include this information in your DMP.