Spring 2025 Publishing Academy: Managing Your Data

• Increase the visibility of your research. If you make your data available through searchable repositories, your data will be able to reach and be easily understood by more people.
• Preserve your data for future research. Maintain long term access to data for your own research. Metadata and preservation also ensures data integrity and proper description.
• Meet funder requirements. Many funding agencies now require a data management plan (DMP) and require data to be made publicly available.
• Facilitate new discoveries. Allowing the reuse of your data opens scientific inquiry. This can help other researchers avoid duplicating your efforts, rather than having to gather similar data themselves.

Basic data management plans will consider the following components:

• description of the project
• description of the data that will be produced
• how data will be managed throughout the project
• documentation about the data, including metadata and format information
• plan for short-term data storage, backup, and security
• legal and ethical issues, such as intellectual property, copyright issues, and privacy
• access, sharing, and reuse of data
• data retention and disposal arrangements
• preservation and archiving to ensure the integrity and long-term preservation of the data