Responsibilities and resources

Data management plan

An essential part of research data management is outlining who will be responsible for each data management activity and for ensuring relevant policies will be followed. It is crucial that roles and responsibilities are assigned and not just presumed. Consider who will assume overall responsibility for implementing the DMP and each of the individual data management activities set out in the plan, how responsibilities will be split in collaborative research projects, and who will be identified as the project’s data steward.

Project members

The UK Data Service lists the project members who may be involved in research data management:

• The project director or principal investigators designing and overseeing the research
• Research staff designing research, collecting, processing and analysing data, thereby taking account where data will be held and who will have access
• Laboratory or technical staff generating metadata and documentation; a database designer
• External contractors involved in data collection, data entry, transcribing, processing and/or analysis, where standard protocols should be agreed in advance and documented
• Support staff managing and administering research and research funding, providing ethical review and assessing intellectual property rights
• Institutional IT services staff providing data storage, security and backup services
• External data centres or web archives that facilitate data sharing

Responsibilities

Data management responsibilities are set out in your data management plan. The principal investigator will typically retain overall responsibility for data management, but they may delegate specific tasks (e.g. managing data collection or creating metadata and documentation). Individuals should be named and assigned responsibilities in the data management plan where possible.

Data steward

A data steward is a common role assigned in a research project. A steward is usually a person employed in any role by the University who is identified as being responsible for the management of a specific set of research data for the purposes of continuity. The data steward should have enough knowledge of the dataset to respond to any future access requests where the data is available only under a certain set of conditions.

Who you identify as the data steward will depend on the nature of the research project and team. For example, the role may be undertaken by a senior researcher, data curator, project officer or research technician.

Postgraduate researchers

For postgraduate research students, while you are primarily accountable for RDM practices, the data steward will typically be your supervisor or nominee. You should consider long-term access and continuity of your research data after you have completed your programme.

Resources

Additional resources may be required to deliver your plan. Consider additional hardware or software requirements, staff time, costs of preparing data for deposit, active storage, and any charges for data repositories. Where dedicated resources are needed, these should be clearly described and justified.

Collaborative research

It is increasingly common for research projects to be undertaken in partnership with researchers and organisations external to the University. This brings additional data management challenges which should be addressed in your data management plan.

You should review any research collaboration and partnership agreements in detail. These agreements are likely to include intellectual property (IP) clauses, which specify where ownership of arising IP will reside. Include this information in your data management plan, ensuring that responsibilities are clearly assigned between parties, and intellectual property is established.