Engineering Research Data Management Plan Requirement Specification

The research context supported by this specification is one in which academics and researchers construct a data management plan (DMP) at the point of writing a funding proposal, primarily to avoid generating duplicate data and to ensure that the data that are generated are optimized for re-use. Throughout the course of the research, the DMP is then used as a record of how the data are being managed, so that on completion of a project, the DMP brings together the information needed to deposit the data for long-term curation. The specification does not, however, cover how the DMP would need to be revised at the point of ingest to support long-term curation; it is aimed at data creators rather than data librarians. The purpose of this specification is not only to outline the information that should be recorded in a DMP for engineering research, but also the manner in which the DMP should be implemented and the functionality that the supporting data management infrastructure should provide.