DMP Guide: SSHRC for Pharmacology, Toxicology & Pharmacy

1. Funder Policy & Open Data Compliance

In alignment with international open-science mandates, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council requires all principal investigators to submit a comprehensive Data Management Plan (DMP) with their grant application. A robust DMP details how research data will be collected, processed, documented, stored, shared, and preserved both during and after the project.

For projects in the field of Pharmacology, Toxicology & Pharmacy, managing data correctly is essential not only for compliance, but also to support peer-review validation and reproducibility. All DMPs must be submitted through the ResearchNet portal, using standard institutional guidelines.

2. Data Types, Formats, and Metadata Standards

A high-quality DMP must explicitly identify the types of data that will be generated and specify open, non-proprietary file formats to ensure long-term usability. For Pharmacology, Toxicology & Pharmacy, datasets typically range from raw observational measurements to curated computational models.

For wet-lab research in **Pharmacology, Toxicology & Pharmacy**, studies generate massive image archives and biology assays. Plan documents must specify encrypted local storage, standardized taxonomy tags matching **Chemicals and Drugs**, and advanced de-identification measures required by **SSHRC**.

To guarantee discoverability, datasets should be documented using standardised metadata schemas that map to the Chemicals and Drugs branch of scholarly vocabularies. This ensures indexers and crawlers can crawl and identify research outputs accurately.

3. Step-by-Step DMP Construction Protocol

When preparing your DMP for a SSHRC proposal, structure your document around these core sections:

1. Data Collection and Generation:
   Describe the methodology, instrumentation, or software used to collect or generate new data. Detail quality assurance and quality control measures implemented at your facility.
2. Documentation and Metadata:
   Explain how the data will be documented, including accompanying read-me files, data dictionaries, and laboratory notebooks. Specify the metadata standards to be utilized (using Dublin Core, ChEMBL schema, CDISC standard as standard).
3. Ethics, Intellectual Property, and Consent:
   Address how sensitive or confidential datasets will be handled. Detail anonymisation processes, access controls, and compliance with institutional ethics boards.
4. Storage, Backups, and Security:
   State where data will be stored during active research. Detail automated backup schedules, server redundancies, and access authorisation protocols.
5. Long-Term Preservation and Archiving:
   Select the digital repository for post-project archiving (such as PubChem, ClinicalTrials.gov, Zenodo, Dryad, and directory servers mapped in Embase, PubMed & TOXLINE). Confirm that the repository supports persistent identifiers (handles/DOIs) and provides secure preservation.

Open Science Workflows, Data Curation & Repositories

When drafting a data management plan dmp to satisfy SSHRC guidelines, defining systematic data collection methods and formal data curation standards is vital. Utilizing institutional dmptool workflows ensures that these administrative requirements are built-in from the outset of the study. This includes describing protocols for data cleaning, validating data integrity via checksums, and conducting secure data wrangling on raw source files. Each output dataset must be documented with an explanatory data dictionary mapping key metadata fields. Architecturally, teams can configure either a secure relational data warehouse or a cost-effective cloud-based data lake, evaluating how this data lake vs data warehouse setup supports formal data analysis and immediate exploratory data analysis under SSHRC guidelines. PIs will facilitate public sharing by leveraging the dryad data repository, creating searchable figshare datasets, or completing a zenodo data upload, ensuring tracking through the data citation index in compliance with nsf data management plan protocols and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council targets. The study will document clear data versioning protocols hosted on the open science framework osf to enable reproducible data sharing matching top fair data principles examples. Furthermore, any community-engaged data must respect the care data principles and support indigenous data sovereignty care standards to ensure local governance of shared knowledge under SSHRC audits. Aligning the archiving schedule directly with SSHRC open-access metrics protects the project's funding cycles.

4. Frequently Asked Questions