
Writing a data management plan: checklists and plans
The planning process for your data management begins with a data planning checklist. This helps you develop your data management plan. The following pages give some suggested questions for a data planning checklist and data management plan.
Your checklist might consider some or all of the following. You can add more to this suggested list depending on the nature of your project:
- What type of data will be produced? Will they be reproducible?
- What would happen if they got lost or became unusable later?
- How much data will be generated and how often will they change?
- Who will be the audience for your data and how will they use them now, and in the long run?
- Who controls them (Principal Investigator, yourself, someone in your school)?
- How long should they be retained? For example, 5 years, up to 10 years, or permanently.
- Are there tools or software needed to create, process, or visualise the data?
- Are there any special privacy or security requirements? For example, personal data, high-security data?
- Are there any ethics committee requirements?
- Is there a good set of project and data documentation?
- What directory and file naming convention will be used?
- What project and data identifiers will be assigned?
- What file formats will be used? Are they long-lived?
- What will be the storage and backup strategy?
- When and where will the data be published?
- Is there a discipline specific standard for data sharing or integration?