Managing your data is critical to the success of your research, grant-seeking, and publication efforts.

Before starting a new research project it is critical to develop a data management plan (DMP), which outlines your practices for collecting, organizing, backing up, and storing the data your research generates.  Good data management will:

• Protect your research data from loss due to theft, catastrophe, or obsolete software
• Help create reproducible research
• Allow reuse of data (by you or others), even years after the research was originally performed
• Increase the integrity of your research

Library Support for Data Management

Data is part of the research process and UCR Library works with data in several ways:

• We help you plan what happens to your research data before, during, and after your research project
• We provide workshops and instructional materials on working with data
• We identify and provide access to major data sets

Creating a Data Plan

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and other grant-giving agencies now require data management plans (DMPs) to accompany proposals. Even if it isn't required, there are excellent reasons to create a DMP.  UCR Library helps researchers and students create DMPs.  You can use the DMPTool on your own or email dataconsult-lib@ucr.edu for in-depth assistance.

Depositing Your Data

There are many options for UC researchers to deposit their data in UCR supported repositories. This allows for safe, permanent archiving, DOI or ARK identification, permanent links and discovery through web interfaces. UCR Library will help you with these services or help find other appropriate data repositories that meet your needs.