Plan research data
At the planning stage of your project, you can start a data management plan where you begin to outline how your research data will be handled.
Data management plan
A data management plan is a formal document that describes how data materials are to be handled during a research project and what will happen with this data after the end of the project. Data management plans must be kept and registered in the same case as other administrative documents in a research project.
Different research funding bodies have different requirements on how specified a data management plan should be, common parts that are usually included are:
How you will protect research data during the project
- How data is collected/produced
- How you will document research data
- How you will organise research data
- What costs you calculate for the management of research data
- How you will preserve and make data available
DMPonline
Write a data management plan using the DMPonline tool. In DMPonline there are templates from some research funders such as VR, but it is also possible to write a data management plan without a specific template.
Create an account in DMPonline (a pdf guide)
DMP (Data Management Plan) online
Metadata
Research data should be searchable and possible for others to find and therefore metadata is important.
Metadata is structured and descriptive information about data. For research data to be found and used by others, it is important to enrich your data set with as comprehensive metadata as possible. It is good to start with this already at the beginning of a research project as it can be difficult to recover metadata to large amounts of data at a later stage.
Different types of metadata:
- Descriptive, for example, title, author
- Administrative, e.g., file format, rights, license
- Structural, such as permanent identifiers such as DOI
It can be a great advantage to use a metadata standard. A metadata standard is a set of rules that determine how metadata should be described and categorised. Different research disciplines may have different metadata standards. In social sciences, the metadata standard DDI is often used, which is also recommended by SND and is used in their input forms. Here you can find several different metadata standards based on subject discipline.