Data Management Plans

Managing research data is a critical aspect of any research, scholarly or artistic project. All federal agencies require proposals to include articulated plans specific to your research related data. And as a policy, we support open accessibility for all LSU generated research.


Developing a Data Management Plan

Key to understanding your data management needs is to know what you are creating and how. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • How am I creating the data? Is it experimental, computational or observational?
  • In what format is the data? (ASCII, jpeg/tiff, xls, other)
  • What kind of metadata will I collect?
  • Do I need to share this data with anyone?
  • What are the end products of my research project?
  • How long will I want to keep this data?

Knowing these answers will help you answer the following questions about what you want to do with your data?

While you are collecting or working with your data, you can store and share data from:

  • Box provides unlimited sharable storage for all faculty and staff.
  • OneDrive - LSU provides 1 TB of storage to all faculty
  • Local - local storage on your computer should NOT be used to share data

You can store your papers, drafts, processed data, and other research products on LSU's institutional repository, LSU Digital Commons.

You can also use domain-specific public archives to provide archival immutable storage for your work.

Long-term storage of your raw data is available on domain-specific public archives. Usually, agencies expect long-term storage of source data for between 7-10 years, depending on the research domain and type of data.

We recommend using DMPTool as a template generator for your research data management plans. It has many agency templates, as well as an "interview"-style workflow to help you generate your document.

The LSU Library also provides assistance to faculty with the development of data management plans upon request. Their page on data management also has example plans for you to review.

We offer regular workshops for faculty, staff, and students on data management and creating plans for personal and grant use.