One of the avenues for librarians to provide research data services to faculty is assistance with data management plans (DMPs) for research funding proposals. The guidance by research funding organizations, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), outlines some common elements that researchers can address in their plans. By studying these plans, we believe we can learn something about researchers’ data management practices and intentions, the suitability to achieving data sharing and preservation, and the resources they might employ in the pursuit of these outcomes. Librarians may also gain insight into the services and infrastructure that could help researchers improve their plans and facilitate better practices across the data lifecycle. In the Data Management Plans As a Research Tool (DART) project, a multi-institutional team of librarians developed a rubric to standardize evaluation of DMPs while accounting for domain-specific differences in NSF guidance, and then applied it to an evaluation of a set of 500 plans from across the universities. This session will briefly review the rubric structure and content, which is available to the public, and its applicability to chemistry DMPs for NSF proposals. The presentation will then describe some of the commonalities that were observed in the DMPs for chemistry research. We'll then propose some ways in which librarians might respond to these findings with new services or modifications of existing research data services and collaborations.

Assessing data management practices and needs through data management plans

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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