Data Management Plans for Open Social Science – Guidance for Researchers

Writing a good data management plan is an integral part of successful open social science practice and a key factor in securing research funding. Yet many researchers have difficulty in fully engaging with writing and implementing their data management plan. This can become a barrier to the publishing high quality, create extra work in depositing discoverable research data, or even lead to irretrievable data losses.

Hannah Boroudjou and Helen Porter showed how to incorporate best practice in data management from the earliest stages of a research project. Key steps include:

• Demonstrating and following quality assurance measures;
• Making sure you keep good documentation and descriptions of your data;
• Addressing technical and storage issues;
• Thinking about copyright and ownership of your data;
• Identifying all of the data that you can publish or need to deposit in an open science database; and,
• Deciding the appropriate levels of access for different parts of your dataset.

This event was part of a series of workshops organised to support the development of the CIVICA Research Open Science Handbook for the Social Sciences.