A data management plan (DMP) is a document, or a paragraph in your research proposal, in which you describe what data you plan to collect, how you are going to store and manage the data during the project and how the data will be shared and archived after the project is finished.
A data management plan makes research data management concrete and practicable. It will ask you questions that will cover the whole research cycle, from any legal arrangements you might need, storage solutions, software tools, all the way to which repository to use to share your research outputs.
In a data management plan, you provide answers to such questions as:
- What data are you going to collect? What type of data or what file formats? How many?
- Where and how will you store your data? What backup methods and procedures do you use?
- How are you going to organise, document, and describe your data?
- Who gets access to your data? When? How are you going to manage access?
- What data will be archived when the project is finished? Where and for how long?
- Will the archived data be made available to others? When? Under what license?
- Who is responsible for the management of your data?
A DMP is a living document. It may well be that you are not able to answer some of these questions at first, or only roughly, for example, because you wish to obtain someone's advice. Or it may turn out that it is better to handle things differently than originally planned. You can always adapt or add to your DMP.
There are various templates and guidance available that will help you write your data management plan, these can be found in DMPonline-Erasmus. You will have to create an account in DMPOnline and you can then link it to your institutional credentials. More details on how to work with DMPOnline.
EUR DMP template and guidelines
There is a EUR specific DMP template, which can be completed using DMPonline-Erasmus. The template was created by the RDM specialists at UL/EDSC and the data stewards. It has been approved by NWO and ZonMw and it is also the default DMP format supported by the EUR.
Below you can find the Word version of the EUR DMP template version 4.6 and guidelines to accompany this template:
Support
Do you need help, or do you want more information on DMP’s or Research Data Management in general? Contact the Research Data Steward at your school (see below). In DMPonline-Erasmus, you can also hit the ‘Request Feedback’ button once you finished a DMP draft. You will then receive feedback from your Research Data Steward.
Contact information
| Person | Faculty | Contact |
|---|---|---|
| Joanna Mania (data steward) | ESHCC ESPhil | |
| Claudia Hernandez Esponda (data steward) | ERIM (RSM & ESE) | data@erim.eur.nl |
| Mark Mulder (data steward) | ESSB | datasteward@essb.eur.nl |
| Bora Lushaj (data steward) | ESL ISS | |
| Katia Roque Molina (data steward) | ESHPM | datasteward@eshpm.eur.nl |
| Erasmus Data Service Centre (EDSC) | All schools |
010-408 12 32 |
| EUR Data Repository | All schools | datarepository@eur.nl |
Disclaimer
The content of this page has been adapted - with kind permission - from the information provided by the University of Amsterdam RDM pages and the University of Groningen Digital Competence Centre.
This page was last updated in January 2025. Did you find a broken link or (seemingly) incorrect information? Please send an email with the title 'Website content' to datasteward@eur.nl.