With the shift towards Open Access and Open Science, research data management (RDM) is playing a crucial role in scholarly communication, funder requirements, academic practices, research strategies and national policies. As data-driven research projects are becoming a common practice, even in humanities, the volume, richness and complexity of data in combination with the applied research activities require proper management, throughout all stages of the process. Thus, technical methodology and support, main features of the digital outputs along with preservation, sustainability, sharing and reuse plans need to be properly documented in a Data Management Plan (DMP).
Funding applications require very often the construction of a DMP, essentially, before the start of the research project. However, as good research data management needs careful treatment throughout all steps of the research process, it is quite difficult to complete a DMP before the start of the project and therefore it needs to be updated during the project, a process known as ‘active data management planning’. However, at the end of the project the final version of the DMP should accompany the documentation and the published data.
DMPs need careful consideration and as they are designed for specific projects, it is difficult to reproduce them in order to be reused for another project. Anyhow, DTL suggests initially to let the FAIR principles guide the DMP, then to use as a template the questions that need to be answered in the DMP, next to prompt the ICT people to provide a standardised description for technical methods and features that could be replicated perhaps for all projects of an organisation and last but not least to create a data management policy document that could be transferred to other projects as well.
Both researchers and institutions are responsible for good data management and although is not a goal on itself it plays a fundamental role in the development of trusted, reusable, interoperable, findable and accessible high quality digital resources. Quite important is that RDM costs associated with open access to research data, can be claimed as eligible costs of any Horizon 2020 grant. Good practices and guidelines on managing research data are provided on the RDM handbook by OpenAIRE and on the FAIR Data Management in H2020 manual by the European Commission. The Data Archiving Networked Services (DANS) has drawn a DMP in order to provide researchers with practical information on documenting, managing and sharing data. Excellent guides on RDM and specifically on producing DMPs are also offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), the UK Data Service and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) UK, which provides also rich information on developing RDM services.