Data Management and Sharing Best Practices

Managing data is an essential part of the research process.  Effective data management helps you organize your files and data for access and analysis, helps ensure the quality of your research, and supports the published results of your research.  Good data practices can create new scientific opportunities and are necessary to achieve the maximum benefit of research.

The resources linked below include information on best practices throughout the research lifecycle:

• FAIR Principles:  FAIR Guiding Principles provide guidelines to support the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets.

• Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR):  Helps biomedical researchers and analysts to create and use structured metadata that adhere to community standards for reporting guidelines and ontologies.

• FAIRsharing.org:  A curated, informative, and educational resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases and data policies.

• FASEB Statement on Data Management and Access:  The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) developed these principles and recommendations to help guide stakeholder efforts to advance data management and access in the biological and medical sciences.

• Implementing Effective Data Practices Toolkit (Association of Research Libraries):  This communication toolkit provides resources for scholarly communications stakeholders to assist in implementing a more connected ecosystem for research data outputs.

• RDA Metadata Standards Directory:  An output of the Research Data Alliance Metadata Standard Directory Working Group, the Metadata Standards Directory is a collaborative, open directory of metadata standards applicable to scientific data.

• National Library of Medicine Health Data Standards:  A common language to support research and health care.

• Ten Simple Rules for Maximizing the Recommendations of the NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan:  This article provides 10 key recommendations for creating a DMSP that is both maximally compliant and effective.