Head of Research and Instruction Services
Data Management Plans
A Data Management Plan (DMP) is a document that outlines your practices for collecting, organizing, backing up, and storing the data you create.
Action Plan for Creating and Implementing a DMP:
- Review your funding agency requirements for data sharing and determine what you need to address in your DMP
- Get help writing your DMP
- Online: DMP Tool
- Online: Use a standard template, review sample plans
- In Person: Consult with librarian on specific questions or for a plan review
- In Person: Request a workshop for your group
- Implement your plan using campus resources and tools
Many funding agencies require a DMP to be submitted with the grant proposal. Depending on the funding agency, the DMP format and requirements vary.
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Collation) has a resource for determining federal funder requirements: Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency
DMPTool.org
This tool has templates for federal agencies, as well as templates contributed by other researchers, all designed to meet the current requirements for federal grants and contracts. The tool prompts you with guidelines and questions specific to your funding agency. Select your funding agency from the drop-down menu in the tool, fill in the text boxes in each section of the plan, export to rich text, and add your completed plan to your proposal.
By selecting LSU as your institution and logging in using your myLSU login and password, you can save your work and apply general institutional information.
LSU also provides a general policy on data management that provides guidelines of what should be included in a DMP.
General Templates and Examples:
DMP examples and templates from various institutions across a wide range of disciplines:
Data Management Plan Template (University of Nebraska Lincoln)
Data Management Plan Examples by Discipline (University of Minnesota)
NSF Engineering Data Management Plan Template (University of Michigan)
Shorter Term Online/On-demand Storage - OneDrive
LSU provides all faculty 1 Terabyte of online storage through OneDrive (Office365). Data on OneDrive is private, but can be shared with collaborators at LSU or other institutions. A larger storage capacity using OneDrive can be provided upon request.
Longer Term Archiving - Digital Commons
LSU hosts an institutional archive using Digital Commons. The archive can be used to publish papers, grey material, data analyses and other research products, where it will be permanently available. Material that is published elsewhere (e.g., journals, federal open-access archives) can be linked to the archive so that faculty can gather their materials without necessarily publishing them directly in Digital Commons.
LSU Digital Commons is part of a network of over 400 institutional archives, through which researchers can discover LSU faculty scholarship and research. The archive also satisfies NSF and NIH requirements for permanent storage of project data and ancillary materials.
Data sets submitted to LSU Digital Commons are reviewed by staff to ensure that data is in a format and structure that best facilitates long-term access, discovery, and reuse. Size limitations may prevent some data sets from being added to Digital Commons. Consult with in advance to review available options.
The following boilerplate text can be used to describe LSU Digital Commons in your data management plan:
A long-term data sharing and preservation plan will be used to store and make publicly accessible the data beyond the life of the project. Data management for this project will be supported by LSU Digital Commons, the institutional repository for LSU: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/. This uses the Digital Commons software, powered by bepress, in order to disseminate and archive the scholarly output of the LSU community. Digital Commons provides full-text indexing in major search engines for discoverability of content and provides secure infrastructure for storage and preservation with multiple backups, cloud storage with Amazon Glacier, and a multi-tiered disaster recovery plan. The investigators will consult with the LSU Libraries to facilitate the ingestion of data into Digital Commons and to ensure that appropriate descriptive metadata standards are in place for all datasets and their supplementary materials. The datasets will be published in LSU Digital Commons for long-term preservation. This will provide it with unique, persistent URLs.
One-on-one Consultations
For consultation and feedback on your DMP, contact us. We will consult with you or point you to the right person, resource, or service on campus.
Training
Creating a Data Management Plan
For faculty and researchers, we will provide an overview of the data management planning process. This workshop includes discussion and works through data management topics through group and paired activities.
Data Management for Graduate Students
Focused on core elements of data management, such as effective data storage options, sharing and reuse policies, metadata, ethical and legal considerations, and preservation of data, and internal and external resources.
Contact us to arrange a training.
The Office of Research & Economic Development
LSU Research Policy on Data Management
Information Technology Services
ITS Security Data Classification