(565c) Teaching the Data Management Plan (DMP) to Graduate Students

The number and types of recently developed courses on Research Data Management (RDM) demonstrate the need for effective education of graduate students in this area. One topic that is common to most RDM courses is the Data Management Plan (DMP). A DMP commonly means one of two types of documents: 1) the two page DMP that is often required by funding agencies as part of a proposal, or 2) the larger DMP documentation for day-to-day use on a research project. The two DMPs’ are designed to address the following major topics: 1) Data that will be created, 2) Data documentation and organization, 3) Data storage and security, 4) Data management after project completion, and 5) Data accessibility for reuse and sharing. The graduate RDM courses generally include a student assignment or term project to prepare one or the other type of DMP, often based on the student’s research project. RDM courses offered through libraries often cover the funding DMP while department offered courses typically cover the project DMP. However, there is not a clear consensus in the literature over exactly what the DMP is and how it is used, and no course to date appears to cover both types of DMPs. Obviously this misunderstanding leads to several different approaches for teaching the DMP while also potentially leaving a hole in the student’s education. These very different types of DMPs then lead to the question: what is the difference in these DMPs, what type of DMP is being taught in the literature courses, and what should be covered in the DMP topic/assignment of a RDM course?

A RDM graduate course was developed and co-taught by a librarian and faculty member with an active research program.[1] This course was designed to provide the students a focused application of RDM to active research projects. The course included tools for developing both types of DMPs and student assignments on both types of DMPs. Following instruction on the use of DMPtool.com[2], an individual student assignment required preparation of a funding agency type DMP based on the agency providing the funding for the student’s project. The Purdue Data Curation Profiles toolkit [3] was then used as a tool to develop a project based DMP for an active research project as an end-of-semester team project.

The focus of this presentation will be an examination of DMPs and how and what should be taught in a graduate RDM course. Examples of DMP instruction from courses reported in the literature will be compared and contrasted. The differences between the two types of DMPs as well as the reasons behind them will be delineated and discussed. Terminology to differentiate the DMPs will be presented. The approaches and outcomes of teaching the two types of DMPs in our course will also be described and compared with the literature. Results and lessons learned from this approach will be discussed.

1. Schmidt, L.O. and J.H. Holles, A Graduate Class in Research Data Management. Chemical Engineering Education, 2018. 52(1): p. 52-59.
2. University of California Curation Center, Data Management Plan Tool. 2014; Available from: https://dmptool.org/.
3. Carlson, J., The Data Curation Profiles Toolkit: User Guide, in Data Curation Profiles Toolkit 2010; Available from: http://datacurationprofiles.org/.