What is research data management?
Data management is a general term covering how you organize, structure, store and care for the information used of generated during a research project.
It includes how you deal with information on a day-to-day basis over the lifetime of a project as well as what happens to data in the longer term - what you do with it after the project concludes.
Why manage data?
Data management should be good research practice as it reduces the risk of losing your data, improves research processes and the continuity of your work and facilitates sharing and re-use of research data for future research (within a research group or with the whole scientific community).
It is increasingly required by various research funders to manage and share data created as part of funded research projects and most research institutions have published their own institutional data policies. This section provides the policy documents on research data management relevant to University of Birmingham academics: