Guides: Research Data Management: Research Data Management

Research Data Lifecycle

Data Management Lifecycle

Source: Research Data Life Cycle from the University of Reading.

Research Data Management

Research data management is a general term covering how you organize, structure, store, and care for the information used or generated during a research project. It includes:

Planning how your data will be looked after – many funders now require data plans as part of applications
How you deal with information on a day-to-day basis over the lifetime of a project
What happens to data in the longer term – what you do with it after the project concludes

Source: "What is RDM?" by the University of Oxford.

Funding Agency Requirements

The draft Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management, as well as CIHR and SSHRC policies for research data management are included below. For information on other funding agencies, please contact your subject librarian.

Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
"Deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data into the appropriate public database (e.g. gene sequences deposited in GenBank) immediately upon publication of research results."
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
"All research data collected with the use of SSHRC funds must be preserved and made available for use by others within a reasonable period of time. SSHRC considers "a reasonable period" to be within two years of the completion of the research project for which the data was collected."

Library Research Data Management Assistance

The library can help you:

Find existing research data
Understand the data management requirements of different funding agencies
Create a data management plan
Choose an appropriate repository for your data
Understand best practices for disseminating and archiving your data

Creative Commons License

This guide was created by Durham College Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License, except where otherwise noted.