Manage Your Data
Data Management Plans
If you're applying for a grant and are required to submit a Data Management Plan, please contact the USF Office of Contracts and Grants for assistance.
A data management plan is a document describing how you will manage your data through all the stages of the research process.
Here are templates and instructions for developing a data management plan:
- Guidelines for Effective DMPs from the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)
- DMPTool from the University of California
- IEDA DMP Tool from Integrated Earth Data Applications, ideal for research in earth sciences
Data Archiving
Data archives store and preserve data, and also typically provide a means of sharing the data with other scholars. If you are looking for a suitable repository to store and/or share your data, or are looking for an existing dataset to validate research findings or mine for a new research inquiry, here are some key resources to explore:
- re3data.org is a registry of research data repositories - a great starting point if you want to see what repositories exist in your area of research
- Harvard Dataverse is a repository open to all researchers worldwide to publish research data across all disciplines, developed by Harvard
- Dryad is a curated general-purpose repository that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable
- FigShare allows users to upload any file format so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets can be disseminated
You can also archive your data in the USF Scholarship Repository. Please contact Nicola Andrews, Open Education Librarian, if you would like to add your data set to the USF Repository.
ACRL Primer for Protecting Sensitive Data in Academic Research
The ACRL Primer for Protecting Sensitive Data in Academic Research was prepared by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Research and Scholarly Environment Committee (ReSEC) as a communication resource about providing protections for sensitive data that may be used or produced in the course of conducting academic research. This primer provides a quick grounding in the whats, whys, and hows of current regulations and practices for protecting sensitive data.
Metadata
Metadata is the backbone of data management. To enable the discovery, access and use of a dataset, the dataset needs to be labelled and organized in a standardized way. Metadata standards serve this purpose, by providing a structured set of elements which describe the dataset.
Metadata standards vary by subject area. See the Digital Curation Centre's Disciplinary Metadata Guide for commonly used metadata standards arranged by subject area.