Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian
Digital Initiatives and Information Technology
University of California, Los Angeles
Patricia Cruse
Director, University of California Curation Center
California Digital Library
In January the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that a data management plan must accompany all grant submissions. This major requirement by the NSF will undoubtedly be taken up by other funding agencies. While the requirement is new for researchers in the United States, the practice has been standard procedure in the European Union for some time. In response to the NSF demand, a group of US libraries and research institutions have formed a partnership with the UK’s Digital Curation Center (DCC) to adapt its Data Management Plans (DMP) Online tool for use in the US. The DMP Online tool draws upon an analysis of funders’ requirements to assist project teams in producing data management plans.
The DMP will be tailored to the requirements of US research funding agencies, as well as to the policies of the institutions they fund. This tool will be freely available, allowing researchers at all institutions to initiate a data management plan quickly and to provide answers to various data management questions relating to their research. The goal is move research data management forward at the national and international levels, ultimately facilitating information exchange at the data level. The partnership of libraries and research institutions includes the University of California at Los Angeles Library, the UC3 from the California Digital Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Virginia Library, the University of California at San Diego Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (library and Chief Information Officer), DataONE, and the DCC.
