[Rdap] Deciding when a Data Management Plan is not required?

[Jan Cheetham]

One of the members of the digital curation team at my campus helped a PI write a DMP for a project that sounds similar to the one you're describing, i.e. it involves establishing a working group of researchers to brainstorm research approaches to solve a particular problem, develop a model, and disseminate the model and reports.

It's not appropriate to share the DMP at this point (since its currently under review by NSF) but I can describe the approach it took in general terms. It broke down the types of data in a table. This included things like reports from the group, the model design, etc. It described formats of these documents (PDF and spreadsheets, mostly) and what type of metadata (eg. author names, dates, copyright, etc) would be embedded in them. The data sharing section described how documents would be shared and accessed by members of the research group during the "discovery" period (including the URLs of relevant wikis and file sharing sites) and also how the results would be disseminated afterwards, including who the target audiences would be, URLs for sites where the results would be published, and stated what the policies for re-use of results would be Finally, there was a section on long term archiving, which mentioned how long documents would be kept, on whose computer, etc., and plans to archive/share the results with archive.org. In total, this DMP is about 1.5 pages long.

Of course, it's too early to know how successful this approach will be with NSF reviewers but I thought it might help to share this much.

Jan



On Apr 21, 2011, at 3:43 PM, Aletia Morgan wrote:

> Greetings – I’m working with PIs on reviewing DMP documents that are part of NSF proposals, and I am wondering about whether a DMP is needed.
>  
> The project involves staging a meeting with researchers in the discipline, with a goal that includes the development of plans for future research.
>  
> Obviously, there’s no experimental data here, and the output is essentially a narrative document.  The PI asserts that “This proposal does not seek to collect environmental data. A data management plan is not
> required.”
>  
> If a conference is being organized, notes are taken, documents are being written.   Is there a need to say how these records will be developed and preserved?  Or am I being too compulsive!
>  
> Thanks for any thoughts, and if there might be a better place to ask this question.
>  
> Regards,
> Aletia
>  
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Aletia Morgan
> Research Application Designer
> Office of the Vice President for Research 
>    and Graduate & Professional Education
> Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
> 715 CoRE Building, Busch Campus
> ahmorgan at vpr.rutgers.edu
> 732-445-3344
> 
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Jan Cheetham, Ph.D.
Research Technologies Consultant
Division of Information Technology (DoIT)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1401 University Ave
Madison, Wisconsin
608-262-2947
cheetham at doit.wisc.edu






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