Penn State Data Management Plan Tutorial

4.1 Benefits of Sharing Data

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Earlier you learned about restrictions on data, especially if the data being collected are sensitive or confidential in any way, as well as about intellectual property rights that can be associated with data.

In a DMP researchers also need to state how they will share and make accessible data that are not restricted. Public access to data marks a central motivation behind the DMP requirement. As stated previously, data that have been generated by a federally funded project is publicly funded data - that is, data made possible by taxpayer dollars. Data sharing is also integral to the responsible conduct of research; it contributes to the verifiability of research results.Thus, in this part of a DMP, you describe how you will make your data available for sharing and reuse.

Using his own lab as an example, in the following video Andrew Stephenson explains some of the reasons why granting agencies, such as NSF, have decided to consider the data from funded research to be public data.

Link to YouTube video.