From the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (2022):
Research Data Management (RDM) is one of the four key elements of Canada’s digital research infrastructure (DRI). It encompasses the processes applied throughout the lifecycle of a research project to guide the collection, documentation, storage, sharing, and preservation of research data, and allows researchers to find and access data.
RDM is an essential part of the research process. Researchers use RDM to:
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada has many training modules to learn about all aspects of RDM.
Some funding opportunities from the Tri-Agency, made up of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), may require researchers to submit a data management plan (DMP). Learn more:
Indigenous data sovereignty calls for Indigenous Peoples, as sovereign Nations, to have the right to control data made by or about Indigenous people and their communities.
The Tri-Agencies (2023) also note the importance of Indigenous Data Sovereignty within RDM:
In an effort to support Indigenous communities to conduct research and partner with the broader research community, the agencies recognize that data related to research by and with Indigenous communities must be managed in accordance with data management principles developed and approved by these communities. These include, but are not limited to considerations of data collection, ownership, protection, use and sharing.
A DMP is a plan that outlines how the researcher is going to create, manage, store, and use data throughout and after a research project.
Note that some Tri-Agency funding requires researchers to submit a data management plan.
re3data or the Registry of Research Data Repositories, is a global registry of research data repositories, which have varying levels of covering numerous academic disciplines. You can use the re3data search tool to locate data repositories that may be appropriate for your research data to be stored in.
Any researcher affiliated with a Canadian institution can deposit data into the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR). The platform can efficiently ingest datasets of any size, and preservation processing is done automatically.
Sherpa Juliet is a resource to search funders' policies on OA and data archiving.
