Data Management Costs

When writing a Data Management Plan (DMP) you are asked to think about and calculate the costs needed to implement your DMP.

This checklist aims to provide guidance and examples of costs (financial and time) that might be needed to implement data management in your project.

  • Acquiring external datasets
  • Formatting and organising (time consuming when done later in the project)
  • Transcription
    • EUR offers several transcription tools for qualitative research. Among these, Amberscript is available. Each faculty is allocated a set number of transcription hours. To request transcription hours, please reach out to your faculty’s information manager.
    • NVivo software license can be requested for 976- Euro (excl. VAT).  For upgrading the cost is 485- Euro (Excl. VAT).
    • If you are interested in transcribing your own qualitative data, you can find helpful tips here.

  • Data description and metadata (time consuming when done later in the project)
  • Documentation (time consuming when done later in the project)

  • EUR provides an ample selection of tools for data storage, but they all have a max of data volume you can use for “free”. If you are collecting data that will exceed these limits (big data, a lot of high-resolution video recordings, etc) some costs might be needed to cover the storage.
    • Example: Cloud database as a service: €160/month (storage 5GB, transfer 30GB).

  • Most research projects can use EUR solutions like SURFfilesender or SURFdrive, but if your project needs remote access via VPN or secured FTP for external (to EUR) people then costs might be applied. Contact info VPN: servicedesk@eur.nl.
  • Data security, if you collect sensitive data, EUR offers storage solutions like EUR Document Vault. However, there is a cap on the volume, if more storage is needed costs might apply. Contact info for DocVault: edsc@eur.nl.

In order to make sure files can be preserved for long periods of time, we recommend uploading files using the preferred file formats. The preferred file formats are open format, if your data/files need to be converted that might imply some extra costs:

  • Example: audiovisual data that needs to be converted can be time consuming, and might require special equipment and/or software.

  • Anonymisation, do you need to remove identifying information before sharing the data?
    • Anonymising audiovisual data, voices, or faces can be very costly
    • For quantitative data, the costs are minimum if identifiers are a priori excluded from the files, but costs may be higher if variables need to be recoded afterwards.
    • For qualitative data, costs can be reduced if anonymisation is done during transcription.
    • Costs will vary depending on how sensitive or complex the data is and how much identifying information is in the data.
  • Copyright
    • Clarifying the ownership of the data in advance (when drafting data sharing agreements, informed consent forms, consortium agreements, licenses, etc.) will make sure the research is not affected later and it is compliant with funder requirements and EUR RDM policy.
  • Data sharing
    • Depositing your data in a repository might take you from 10 min to 4 hours, depending on the requirements of the repository. EUR Data Repository offers data curation and long-term storage at no extra costs, but if you want to use other repositories, extra costs might apply

  • Publishing your research results in scholarly journals can entail a publication fee. Publication costs are considered eligible costs by most funders. However, different types of article processing charges (APCs), e.g. publishing in “Gold” OA journals vs “Hybrid” journals vs non-APC journals, are not always re-imbursed by all funders. Please see information about:

This page was last updated in February 2024. Did you find a broken link or (seemingly) incorrect information? Please send an email with the title 'Website content' to datasteward@eur.nl.

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