Data Management Plans & Funder Requirements
A data management plan (DMP) sets out, before a project begins, how the data it produces will be organized, documented, stored, shared, and preserved. This sub-cluster brings together the funder policies that make DMPs mandatory, the templates and tools used to write them, and the criteria reviewers apply when judging whether a plan is adequate. In the United States, the NIH's 2023 Data Management and Sharing Policy (DMSP) requires a data management and sharing plan for nearly all funded research that generates scientific data, while individual NSF directorates maintain their own DMP requirements with differing expectations for content and length. Beyond individual funder mandates, the Research Data Alliance's DMP Common Standard Working Group has worked to make DMPs machine-actionable, structured so that the commitments they contain, such as repository choice, licensing, and timelines for release, can be tracked, validated, and reused across systems rather than filed away as static prose. For a research administrator, this area matters at two points in the grant lifecycle: at proposal stage, where a DMP must satisfy sponsor requirements to be compliant and fundable, and at award closeout or reporting, where institutions increasingly need to verify that commitments made in the plan were actually met. Pages in this sub-cluster cover what a compliant plan must contain, how requirements differ by funder and discipline, what templates and DMP-writing tools are available, and how machine-actionable DMP standards are changing the relationship between planning documents and the systems that enforce them.
Guides
AEA Data and Code Availability Policy: What to Deposit
What the AEA Data and Code Availability Policy requires economics researchers to deposit — data, code, and a README — where it goes (the AEA Data and Code Repository on openICPSR), what can be withheld, and how pre-publication verification works.
NEH Data Management Plan Requirements for Digital Humanities Grants
How NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities defines Data Management Plan requirements for digital humanities grants, and how they differ from NSF and NIH DMPs.
ERC Data Management Plans Under Horizon Europe: Requirements, Timeline & Templates
How the European Research Council’s Data Management Plan requirements work under Horizon Europe: the no-opt-out mandate, the one-page RDM statement required at proposal stage under the Excellence criterion, the month-6 deliverable deadline, and practical guidance for preparing a compliant plan.
Data Management Plan Template and Structure: A Complete Guide
A funder-agnostic walkthrough of what a data management plan template actually contains: the seven sections nearly every DMP asks for, how DCC, Science Europe, and funder-embedded formats structure them differently, and how this structural map relates to CASRAI’s funder-specific DMP guides.
How to Use DMPTool for NSF and NIH Data Management Plans
A step-by-step walkthrough of the DMPTool workflow for building an NSF or NIH data management plan: account setup, organization and funder template selection, writing and sharing the plan, exporting it, and registering a DMP ID.
NIH Resource Sharing Plan vs. Data Management and Sharing Plan
The NIH Resource Sharing Plan and the 2023 Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Plan are separate, differently-scoped requirements filed under the same application attachment section — a single award can require both.
NSF’s Move to the Research.gov DMSP Webform: What Changed
NSF replaced its PDF-upload Data Management and Sharing Plan with a structured Research.gov webform on April 27, 2026. Here’s what changed and how to map an existing plan into the new 8-section format.
Data Sharing Policy: Funder and Institutional Requirements Explained
What a data sharing policy is, who issues one (funders, institutions, journals), the major examples (NIH DMS Policy, NSF, ICMJE), and how meeting a policy differs from executing a bilateral data sharing agreement.
Horizon Europe FAIR Data Management Plan: Requirements & Template
Horizon Europe requires a FAIR-structured Data Management Plan, due in full by month 6 of the project, distinct in format and timing from NIH/NSF-style DMPs.
NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan Template: How to Fill It Out
A section-by-section walkthrough of NIH’s Data Management and Sharing Plan template, covering both the original 2023 narrative format and the shorter 2026 Pilot format required for due dates on or after May 25, 2026.
NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy: Requirements, Timeline, and Compliance
What the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy actually requires: who it applies to, what a compliant DMS Plan must contain, how it differs from the older NIH Public Access and Genomic Data Sharing policies, and how compliance is checked.
Knowledge Dissemination: Funder Requirements and Dissemination Plans
Knowledge dissemination is a distinct, often mandatory funder deliverable — a planned, audience-mapped effort to communicate findings, separate from open-access publishing, public engagement, and the data management plan.
Wellcome Early-Career Award: Eligibility and Outputs Management Plan
What the Wellcome Early-Career Award requires: eligibility, funding, timing, and the Outputs Management Plan — Wellcome’s data management plan equivalent — assessed alongside scientific merit.
DMP Review Criteria: What Funders Actually Check
How funders actually evaluate a Data Management Plan: whether it is scored by peer reviewers or checked separately by program staff, plus the completeness, feasibility, budget-alignment, and repository criteria reviewers apply.
Data Management Plan Worked Examples: Two Full, Filled-In Plans
Two complete, fully-written example DMPs — an NSF-format social-science survey plan and an NIH-format genomics plan — showing what specific, funder-ready answers actually look like, not another blank template.
NIH vs. NSF Data Management Plans: What Actually Differs
How NIH’s DMS Plan and NSF’s DMSP differ in practice – page limits, templates, upload mechanics, 2026 format changes – plus how to make either one machine-actionable under the RDA DMP Common Standard.
