Data Management Implementation Plan Template
Data Management Implementation Guidance Document
Github Repository

The Data Management Plan Implementation Template Project

Summary

In this repository you will find a template that will help you put your Data Management Plan into action. This repository is designed to make your life easy, so that you can start working on the implementation of your Data Management Plan right away, following a few steps:

• Import this repository and add your collaborators.
• Make the template page be your index.md page
• Start editing! Fill the blanks, delete and add as you need so that this document is useful for your research project.
• Consult the guidelines from the original repository to help you make choices about what to write in your DMP implementation. Consult the guidelines to learn how to edit this template and make it into a website if you are unfamiliar with GitHub and Markdown.

Context of the project

Many funding agencies require the Principal Investigator to submit a Data Management Plan with grant applications. The Data Management Plan is usually a two page document in which the researcher makes a plan for how the research data generated or used during the project will be managed. The requirements for Data Management Plans vary depending on the agency requiring them, but they often include these pieces of information:

• Data description: a description of the types of data to be produced in the course of the project. The amount of data that will be generated. How the data will be collected. What format the data will be saved on, and whether standards will be used for the data.
• Data documentation: description of how the data will be documented (given metadata). Metadata standards.
• Policies for accessing and sharing: when and how the data will be made publicly available. If there is any sensitive data, how will the confidentiality of research subjects be protected? Formats that will be used to make the data available.
• Policies for re-use and redistribution, and how these policies will be communicated (e.g. through data licenses).
• Data archiving and preservation: how will the data will be preserved for the long term.
• Roles and responsibilities: who in the project will have the responsibility of implementing the data management plan, and who will have the responsibility of doing all the other data management tasks: data collection, data organization, data quality control, data documentation, preparation for data archival, etc.

Data management plans are relatively new and there are still several challenges around their use. Two of the challenges that this project aims to solve are:

• The fact that a data management plan is written at the beginning of the grant does not mean that the data management plan will be implemented and followed during the research project. It is not always clear how granting agencies check for compliance at the end of the project.
• The data management plan is writen at the proposal stage of the research process, so it has general provisions and it generally does not go into great detail about day to day data management practices.
• Data management strategies can change during the research project. There is no established practice to make Data Management Plans be live documents,

This template attempts to be a list of things that you will probably want to think about, regarding data management, before and during the research project. The goal of having this template in github is to make it easily available to all the researchers in your group, and to make it a living document, where you can document changes as they happen.

Suggested use of this template

You can take this template and use it as you want. It is published under a CC0 license. However, this is how we think it is most useful:

• Once your grant has been awarded: pass the information from the Data Management Plan submitted with the grant proposal to this template. During this process, make data management practices specific so that they can be useful in the day-to-day in the lab. You can involve other members of the team who weren’t involved in the grant writing process.
• At the beginning of the project: use it to involve other researchers in data management decisions.
• During your project: use it as a reference document to train new researchers that get involved in the research project..
• During the project: use it to document changes in any of the data management practices followed by the group.
• At the end of your research project: use it to document your compliance with funders requirements related to data management.
• At the end of the project: use it to inform the data management plan of your new grant proposal.
• Before, during and after your project: make your research more transparent by making your research data management practices publicly available.

FAQ

Who is this project for?

This Data Management Plan implementation template is aimed to document data management practices of research projects, large and small, of any disciplines.

Whomever is responsible for data management decisions in the project, will probably be the one interested in using this template. In many cases this person will be the Principal Investigator with the help of the research team. In large projects it may be a data manager. A grad student in charge of his/her research project may want to use this too.

We have tried to make this template as general as possible. It is possible that this template will fit some fields more than others. If you have feedback to give us open an issue or send us an e-mail to ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu, we are very interested in hearing whether this is useful for you!

Why do I need an implementation of a Data Management Plan?

Data Management Plans are often submitted with grant proposals. Thus, these plans are written generally, as many details about day to day data management are still not known. Many research groups are also not used to document changes in their data management plan during the research process, so the Data Management Plan becomes less useful.

The goal of this template is both to help research groups make concrete and specific decisions about data management practices, and to make it a living document that can be updated and consulted often.

Is this a Data Management Plan template?

No, this is a Data Management Plan Implementation template. A Data Management Plan is a document that many funding agencies require be submitted with grant proposals. This template assumes that you already have a Data Management Plan, and that you want to put it into action. This template includes a lot more details than what you want to write in your Data Management Plan.

If you need help to write a Data Management Plan you can:

• Find guidance in DMPTool.org
• Find guidance in DMPonline
• Find guidance at the library of your institution. Many institutions have wonderful guidance in their websites, and librarians that can help you to write a Data Management Plan.
• If you are a researcher of Oregon State University, you can contact Research Data Services at ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu

How can I get help to write my own Data Management Plan?

This template is not for writing Data Managment Plans for grant applications. It is to write a living implementation of such Data Management Plans.

If you need help to write a Data Management Plan you can:

• Find guidance in DMPTool.org
• Find guidance in DMPonline
• Find guidance at the library of your institution. Many institutions have wonderful guidance in their websites, and librarians that can help you to write a Data Management Plan.
• If you are a researcher of Oregon State University, you can contact Research Data Services at ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu

Does my Data Management Plan Implementation need to be in GitHub?

No, it does not need to be in GitHub. There are a few reasons why we have decided to host this Data Management Plan Implementation Template in GitHub:

• Because you can easily clone our template, edit it, and have a website with your Data Management Plan Implementation. Having a public Data Management Plan Implementation in the form of a website will help your research group because it will make your data management practices transparent, and because everybody in your research group will be able to consult them easily from wherever they are.
• Because it is a tool that many researchers are already familiar with. If you are not one of these researchers, we have created guidelines to help you through the process.
• Because you can edit websites with Markdown. You do not need to know html or other programming languages. Markdown is generally intuitive and easy to learn for most researchers. We have also included a few guidelines for Markdown editing in this template, just in case.

However, there are many reasons why GitHub may not be the right choice for a research project. This template is also accessible as a Word document, a pdf, and a LaTeX document.

Your template does not fit very well with my discipline.

Please, let us know! Write us an e-mail at ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu or open an issue. We may be able to improve the template in the future.

This template can be changed as much as you need, so hopefully this will still be somewhat useful to help implement the Data Management Plan of your research project.

What does DMP stand for?

Data Management Plan

What if I don’t have a Data Management Plan?

The assumption of this Data Management Plan Implementation Template is that you have a Data Management Plan that you want to implement. This is the case of many research projects because many funding agencies require data management plans to be submitted with grant proposals. But if this is not your case, you can still use this template! We actually really encourage you to do so. Go ahead and start editing!

I am a grad student. Should I use this template?

Yes. Data Management Plans are absolutely useful for masters research projects or for PhD research projects. We encourage you to write a Data Management Plan, whether you use this template or not! It is most useful to write a Data Management Plan at the beginning of your project, but it will still be useful at other more advanced stages of the project.

I have feedback for you.

Excellent! Please open an issue with the feedback or send an e-mail to ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu. We appreciate your time doing that!

How do I acknowledge that I am using your template?

This template is published under a CC0 license. You are not expected to give attribution, but we will apreciate it if you do. You can include a line to your Data Management Plan or to the readme of your repository saying “This DMP has been generated using the template developed by Clara Llebot Lorente and Mark Landon, working for Research Data Services at the Oregon State University Library. https://github.com/landonma/datamanagement”

I need help!

If you need help to write a Data Management Plan you can:

• Find guidance in DMPTool.org
• Find guidance in DMPonline
• Find guidance at the library of your institution. Many institutions have wonderful guidance in their websites, and librarians that can help you to write a Data Management Plan.
• If you are a researcher of Oregon State University, you can contact Research Data Services at ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu

If you need help to write the implementation of your Data Management Plan you can:

• Find guidance at the library of your institution. Many institutions have wonderful guidance in their websites, and librarians that can help you to write a Data Management Plan.
• If you are a researcher of Oregon State University, you can contact Research Data Services at ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu
• If you can’t find help in your institution and you are not part of Oregon State University you can send us an e-mail. We may be able to help with general guidance, although we cannot offer in depth advice to researchers not belonging to Oregon State University.

In what other formats can I find this template?

We also offer this template in Word, pdf and LaTeX.

I don’t want my data management plan to be openly available. How can I use this template?

Unfortunately, there is no way of hosting a website using GitHub pages and having your pages be private. They will be openly available. You can use other formats of the template that we distribute: Word, pdf, LaTeX.

Will I find this template useful if I am not from OSU?

We have writen this template as generally as possible so that it is useful to the maximum number of people. However, the guidance document has been written with Oregon State University in mind, so that it is especially useful for researchers of that institution. If you have suggestions about how to improve the template or the guidance so that it is useful, please open an issue or send an e-mail to ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu

About us

This template has been developed by Clara Llebot Lorente and Mark Landon, working for Research Data Services at the Oregon State University Library.

This work is licensed under a CC0 license. If you would like to give attribution, you can include the following line in the readme of your repository, or somewhere in your data management plan, but you are not expected to do so. “This DMP has been generated using the template developed by Clara Llebot Lorente and Mark Landon, working for Research Data Services at the Oregon State University Library. https://github.com/landonma/datamanagement”

We always welcome feedback (good and bad) about how this template has helped you. You can open an issue in this repository, or send us an e-mail to researchdataservices@oregonstate.edu.

How to Use This Repository

This repository contains the tools necessary to create a data management implementation plan and a webpage for your project. We have created template and guidance documents to allow you to easily create a plan specific for your project. as a lot of this walkthrough is designed to help set up a Github Pages webpage. The following steps contain links and instructions to help you through this process. After completing these steps you will have a data management plan and a working webpage for specific to your research project. If you are only interested in creating the data management plan and don’t want to make a Github Webpage then skip to this step.

Github

Github is a website with variety of uses including: sharing data and creating collaborative projects. You will need a Github account if you want to use Github to publish your documents and can create one here.

• Note: the url for the webpage will use either the username or organization name which sets it up. Try to make sure the URL will be appropriate to share with others and relevant to what is on the webpage.

There are two types of repositories on GitHub; public ones and private ones. Public repositories can be seen by and downloaded by anyone on the web but only edited by collaborators. Private repositories can only be seen by its contributors. Normally Github charges for private repositories but researchers can apply for a free private account by following these steps.

Github Pages

Github Pages allows you to create webpages where Github provides hosting and a web domain name. This allows you to publish documents through GitHub that anyone can access through a web browser.

————** IMPORTANT NOTE ** ————

GitHub Pages are ALWAYS PUBLIC REGARDLESS OF THE PRIVACY OF THE REPOSITORY. This combined with the fact that ALL FILES IN THE REPOSITORY ARE VIEWABLE means you must be certain their is ABSOLUTELY ZERO private information in your repository before you set it up with Github Pages. You can decide which repositories in your account to publish using Github Pages with one exception, your USERNAME.github.io repository (which must be created for Github Pages to work with any of your repositories) will always be navigable and thus public. If there is some question about whether this holds true for your or not, it maybe best to simply create a new Github repository free of the private information to use with Pages.

Setting Up Your Account to Use Github Pages

Setting up Github Pages is fairly simple and straight forward.

• First, in your browser, go to github.com and make sure you are logged into the account which will publish your documents.
• Then create a new repository with the name USERNAME.github.io (where the USERNAME is replaced with your username). I entered “landonma.github.io” since my username is landonma.
• You can now navigate to any files uploaded to this repository
  Note: Github pages usually takes around 5-7 minutes to upload new pages and edits

To do this (after reading the IMPORTANT NOTE above)

Next you will need to set up your Github account to here.

• Note: Github pages does take some time to respond to new pages and edits, so wait 5-7 minutes after making changes before assuming something went wrong.
• Once a user or organization is set up to use Github pages, all their repositories will be navigable in a browser

Next clone or download our repository. Then place upload the template file into your own repository. (Here is a quick article if you are unfamiliar with Github)

Markdown editing

Markdown was created to be easy to read and edit and we use this format for all the documents in this repository. Markdown files(.md) have some of the functionality of writing documents in an HTML format while still remaining easily readable. Github and Github Pages are set up to use Markdown already. The coding involved with formatting a Markdown document is easy to learn and you can find a guide for using markdown here. Some additional tips for creating markdown documents:

• There must be a space after the ##’s when making headers
• There is NO space when bolding and using italics; ie. bold not ** bold **
• If you want to force a line break put two spaces at the end of the line then press Enter. (ie. end of line.” __ “)
• The guide shows the different ways to format hyperlinks but doesn’t describe the different types of links. I describe the different links in other section below.

It is easiest to edit markdown files either by editing the documents through Github in a web browser or by using source code editing software such as Notepad++ or Atom (these docs were created using Atom). You could theoretically use Microsoft Word or Google Docs but it is strongly recommended that you use Github’s editor instead. To edit them using Github simply navigate to your repository, click on the file you want to edit and click the edit (pencil) button on the top right of the page.

Using Our Template and Guide Documents

The template markdown file (found here) is meant to be edited and filled out directly. As you look through the template file you should fill in any _____ spaces and change any of the boiler-plate text with details specific for your project.

The guidance document (found here) is meant to help you think about the important parts of each section and is not meant to be edited and published. This document will help illustrate what is important to include and consider in each section.

Customizing Github Pages

When you use Github Pages your repository is your webserver. Therefor, the file titled “index” will be the homepage of your website. For the repository we created that page is the one you are reading right now. For your repository you will want something that suites your needs.

If the only page you want is the data management implementation plan document you can rename that document “index.md”. Now whenever you navigate to your repository URL you will get document.
You may want a list of links with some basic text for the home page. To do this, use this markdown file as a template and edit the text and links as necessary. There are three types of links used in this repository and they all have slightly different text inside the parentheses “ () “. To best distinguish between these types it is best to look at the code in an editor.

• Some of them are basic hyper links which contain the full url of the page in the () which is linked to ie. google.com.
• Others are relative links which match a file name in your repository. To create this type of link include the full file name exactly as it appears in the repositry including the extension. Data Management Implementation Plan Template. All the links that point to other pages in this repository were created using relative links so if you have all the file names as this repository then your wont have to change any of these links (but may need to delete ones such as the link to the guidance file).
• There are also “links” which jump to header within the same page. These are used in the table of contents this. The link must be all lower case and the spaces are replaces with dashes -. Make sure to change these links whenever a header name is changed. Also note that there should only be ONE # regardless of the header level.

Github has also created a number of themes that change the appearance of your pages and can be viewed here. Instructions on how to apply the themes are here. This repository has no theme applied to it but you are welcome to try them out.

• I suggest the method that edits the “_ config” file because you can simply delete the line if you want to remove the theme later.

You can also use HTML to create/format any pages on your repository. For simplicity and to show what Markdown can do; nothing in this repository was written using HTML.