Data Management Plans

All Interdisciplinary Challenge Teams (ICTs) for the Genome Canada’s Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Systems Initiative have created a Data Management Plan (DMP) using the DMP Assistant of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC) .

Share contents of your DMP with your team so all your project members know data management expectations.

Data Management Plans are one of the foundations of good research data management (RDM), an international best practice, and increasingly required by institutions and funders, including Canada’s three major research funding agencies as outlined in their Research Data Management Policy.

Data Management Plans contain important information for project participants such as how to name files, how and where to save data securely, what file formats to use, and what are relevant ethical and legal compliance considerations.

Be sure that all team members working in the project have the relevant information from the DMP, for example, that they know the file naming conventions. This information can be shared directly by making the DMP available, or it can be used to generate a lab and project data Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). The SOP acts like the syllabus for a course; it outlines the data essentials and expectations for the lab and/or project.

Data Management Plans are living documents, they are expected to be updated and changed throughout the lifecycle of the project. The PDF versions of the DMP exported from DRAC DMP Assistant contain the last modified date to help researchers identify which revision they are referencing.

Samples of lab data SOPs