Data Plan Essentials

What’s a data plan?

Data plans for a study or project:

• describe which data will be kept and for how long
• explain how data will be formatted and described for reuse and interpretation
• make clear policies around data access, use, and attribution/copyright
• are a required component of proposals for funding with several federal agencies. See the University of Minnesota’s comprehensive list of national agency data-plan requirements.

Data plan examples

• Lakeshore Nature Preserve
• Nitrogen Cycle Card Game

Resources

Resource	Description
What's Your Data Plan?	Our digital data-plan guide for hard science and quantitative social science.
Preserving Your Digital Heritage	Our guide for planning to preserve digital collections from the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
Data Management and Publishing	The MIT Library’s guide to managing data and creating a data plan.
Digital Preservation Management	The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) tutorial on data preservation.
Conducting a Data Interview	Ten quick questions about research data, from Purdue University.
Escaping Datageddon	Our presentation on data-management essentials. Contact us if you'd like us to give this presentation for you!