Back to Reference
Contents
Reference
598 words
Jun 25, 2026

Data Management Plan (DMP) Builder

The Data Management Plan builder helps you write the FAIR data management plan that funders increasingly require - Horizon Europe, NSF, Wellcome, NRF and many others. It is structured on the RDA / Science Europe machine-actionable DMP (maDMP) common standard, so the plan you write maps cleanly onto what reviewers expect and onto the maDMP JSON other tools can read.

A DMP is scoped to a single research project. You can keep more than one plan per project (for example, a draft for one funder and a published plan for another).

Where to find it

Open a research project, then choose Data Management Plan from the project tools:

  • Research > (your project) > Data Management Plans

Creating a plan

  1. Click New Plan.
  2. Give the plan a title (optional - it defaults to "Data Management Plan").
  3. Record the funder if you have one. The funder is captured as data on the plan; it is never assumed and never defaulted to any one country.
  4. Optionally choose a funder template hint (generic, Horizon Europe, NSF, Wellcome, NRF). These are selectable examples, not assumptions, and an administrator can add more from the Dropdown Manager.
  5. Optionally set the plan language, and a contact name and email.
  6. Click Create plan. The plan is created with the full maDMP section set, ready to fill in.

The maDMP sections

Every plan carries the recognised maDMP question set:

  • Data description and collection - what data you collect, generate or reuse.
  • Documentation and data quality - metadata, README files, standards, quality.
  • FAIR - Findable - persistent identifiers and rich, indexed metadata.
  • FAIR - Accessible - how and under what conditions the data can be accessed.
  • FAIR - Interoperable - open, standard formats and vocabularies.
  • FAIR - Reusable - licences, provenance and how long the data stays usable.
  • Storage and backup during the project - where data lives and how it is backed up and recovered.
  • Preservation and retention - long-term repository and retention period.
  • Data sharing and access control - when and how data is shared, any embargo.
  • Ethics, legal and privacy - consent, personal data, IP and jurisdictional obligations (jurisdiction-neutral).
  • Responsibilities and resources - who is responsible and what is needed.
  • Costs - anticipated data-management costs and how they are covered.

Completeness indicator

Both the plan list and the editor show a completeness bar: how many of the maDMP sections carry an answer, as a count and a percentage. It reaches 100% when every section has been filled in. This is a coverage guide, not a quality score.

Editing a plan

The editor shows the plan details (title, status, funder, language, contact) at the top, then one text box per maDMP section. Set a status (Draft, In Review, Approved, Published, Superseded) and click Save plan. Use View to see the assembled, read-only plan and print it.

Machine-readable export (maDMP JSON)

Every plan has a maDMP JSON button. It downloads the plan as an RDA / Science Europe maDMP common-standard document: a top-level dmp object with title, language, created and modified dates, contact, a project block (including the funder when set), and a dataset array. The full structured section set is also preserved under a namespaced extension, so nothing is lost in the round trip. This is the format other DMP tools and funder portals can ingest.

Notes

  • Statuses and funder-template hints are managed through the Dropdown Manager, so an administrator can add, rename or retire them without a code change.
  • Defaults are jurisdiction-neutral; funder examples are illustrative only.
  • The builder only ever writes to the plan - it never alters your project data.