Supporting Researchers in Creating Data Management Plans

Researchers are increasingly encouraged by different stakeholders to make research processes
as transparent as possible, to enable reproducible research results and to share their
(research) data FAIR and open with others. At the same time, the concrete requirements -
often including the development of a data management plan - vary to a great extent between
the different funding bodies, journals and research organizations. Likewise, there is often little
concrete indication on how such requirements should be implemented or what is best practice
to do so.

Based on the work of Science Europe, we aim to define standardized, public and
referenceable domain data protocols for educational research, serving as a ‘model’ data
management plan for the corresponding community. Such domain data protocols support
researchers in processing high quality data, based on the idea of replicable research, FAIR data
and Open Science.

Taking core standards and best-practices guidelines as well as legal and ethical issues into
account, domain data protocols describe relevant activities to sample, clean, document and
manage data appropriately, depending on the concrete type of data as well as on the method
of sampling employed in the respective research project. Data, processed on the basis of
domain data protocols are prepared for data archiving in a research data center, a (trusted)
repository or data archive and thus for sharing with other researchers, both for the purpose of
replication and for the re-use in new research contexts.

Moreover, predefined domain data protocols can be used to support researchers in preparing
project proposals when applying for funding. They aim at increasing researchers’ awareness of
relevant tasks to undertake in the context of managing data and simplify budgeting of such
activities in proposals. From the funder’s perspective, data protocols reduce the costs of
reviewing funding applications as well as (periodical) reports on data management by
suggesting and aiming at implementing standardized procedures.

In sum, developing domain data protocols for educational research contributes to efforts
undertaken in making data sharable, open and FAIR. In addition, the domain-specific protocols
can be seen as prototypes for other research disciplines.