Find out how to write a data management plan and estimate RDM costs.
- Writing your data management plan
Having a data management plan (DMP) is essential for your research project. A good DMP lets you work more efficiently and improves the integrity and impact of your research.
A data management plan describes:
- what data you will collect and how, as well as which software will be used for collecting, processing and analysis;
- how you will save and share the data during the research project;
- how you will make the data sustainably available and, if possible, publish them afterwards (watch this video about sharing data);
- how the data will be documented;
- how data will be shared and transferred securely;
- what legal issues are relevant, such as copyright, the right to reuse the data and the treatment of sensitive data.
The information you provide in the DMP has to comply with the UT research data management policy and, if available, the data policy of your faculty and research group, as well as legal, contractual and funder requirements.
To write your DMP, please use the UT DMP-tool. The template in this tool is also accepted by NWO, ZonMw and EU.
As a guidance when writing a DMP you can follow the research data management course.
- Estimating data management costs
Costs for data management made during a research project can be inserted into a proposal’s budget. These may be costs related to temporary storage, to the anonymization or the transcription of data, or to the curation of data before sustainable archiving.
In case of archiving your research data in 4TU.ResearchData the costs for depositing up to 1 TB/yr will be reimbursed by the UT. At Dans depositing is free of charge for individual researchers with datasets under 50 GB. The rate for depositing larger files is determined by a number of factors. More information.
Use this guide for estimating research data management costs. For costs of UT RDM services see this overview.