About the NSF Data Management Plan Requirement
The NSF announced in October 2010 a requirement for grant applicants to provide a Data Management Plan to be submitted alongside all grant proposals beginning January 18, 2011. The plan will take the form of a two-page supplementary document that is subject to peer review.
Resources provided by the NSF include:
- General guidelines in the Grant Proposal Guide
- General guidelines in the Award and Administration Guide
- Unit-specific guidelines (for proposal submitted to the Engineering Director, Division of Earth Sciences, Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, Division of Ocean Sciences, or the Division of Social and Economic Sciences)
- A Data Management Plan FAQ
Generally speaking, the Data Management Plan document may include:
- the types of data, samples, physical collections, software, curriculum materials, and other materials to be produced in the course of the project;
- the standards to be used for data and metadata format and content (where existing standards are absent or deemed inadequate, this should be documented along with any proposed solutions or remedies);
- policies for access and sharing including provisions for appropriate protection of privacy, confidentiality, security, intellectual property, or other rights or requirements;
- policies and provisions for re-use, re-distribution, and the production of derivatives; and
- plans for archiving data, samples, and other research products, and for preservation of access to them.
For more information about developing a Data Management Plan, go here.
Other Funding Mandates for Data Sharing
In addition to the NSF, the following government agencies have articulated data management or data sharing policies:
- National Institutes of Health
- NASA (Earth Science)
- National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities
The University of Minnesota Libraries website provides a useful summary of these data guidelines here: https://www.lib.umn.edu/datamanagement/funding.