By Andrew Creamer, Scientific Data Management Specialist

An increasing number of private and publicly funded research sponsors require a data management plan (DMP) and/or sharing plan with submissions of proposals for funding. The Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Brown University Library works with graduate students and faculty to write DMPs that meet the standards set by their research sponsors data access and sharing policies. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which was the first major federal funder to require a DMP, explains that DMPs are to be reviewed as an integral part of the proposal, coming under Intellectual Merit or Broader Impacts or both, as appropriate for the scientific community of relevance.

The NSF proposals data management plan can connect with its Broader Impacts in several ways. Researchers detail in their NSF DMPs when and how they will make their data available for other researchers and/or the public, how they will archive and preserve access to their data after the project ends, and they outline the dissemination strategy for their projects research products, which can include citing and sharing the projects data, metadata, and code in their publications and presentations and depositing these items into a data-sharing repository. Making data, metadata, and code, along with the resulting publications, accessible maximizes the potential for replication and reproduction of research results, and therefore they further the impact of the project by making it possible for their data to be discovered, used, repurposed, and cited to aid in new research and discoveries.

Ways Brown University Library and CDS Support Broader Impacts of Research Data

• The library advises on selecting optimal file formats and media in which research products can be stored, shared, and accessed. Proprietary software and data formats used to collect and capture data can impact the potential for a dataset to be of use by others. Researchers can work with the library to identify and export their data files into data-sharing and preservation-friendly formats.

• Brown University Library collaborates with researchers to create the documentation and contextual details (metadata) that can make their data and other research products discoverable and meaningful to others. The library can help researchers locate metadata schema, standards and ontologies for a specific discipline, and it can also help to create metadata for data being prepared for upload into to a data-sharing repository, such as the Brown Digital Repository.

• Depositing data and research products such as the curricula written for Broader Impacts into a repository is the best way for researchers to guarantee that their these products will be discovered and used by others. It is also the easiest way to locate and access data years after a project ends. Brown University Library offers a number of repository related services. It can help researchers to choose and evaluate potential repositories. The library also offers the Brown Digital Repository (BDR) as an option for some researchers to publish, archive, and preserve their projects data after their projects end.

• The library offers a global persistent identifier service for researchers wishing to maximize the dissemination and discoverability of their research. A digital object identifier (DOI) provides researchers and the public a way to locate and cite data and other research products. The library can issue Brown researchers DOIs, even if their datasets are not in the BDR. For example, the library can issue researchers DOIs for the datasets they have deposited in NCBI databases that have accession numbers so they can then cite these datasets in their publications, presentations, and grant reports. The library also mints DOIs for researchers who are required by publishers to submit a DOI for their datasets underlying their manuscripts or for compliance with their publishers data availability and data archiving policies.

While you may have not thought about the Brown University Library and CDS before when it comes to disseminating research products, we hope that you will begin to see us as a partner and ideal place to plan for assistance with data retention, appraising which data should be retained, archived, and preserved, exploring options for sharing and long-term preservation-friendly file formats, creating documentation and metadata or making data discoverable and useful, publishing and archiving data in a repository, citing data, and measuring the impact of your published data and products related to your research outcomes.

For more information about Brown University Library and CDS researcher support services as well as for help with writing a data management and sharing plan, please contact Andrew Creamer Andrew_Creamer@brown.edu.