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Getting funding for RDM

Excerpt from "Guidelines on Digital Research Data at TU Darmstadt"

"When applying for external funding, the departments check what effort research data management will require in the project and what opportunities exist to raise corresponding funds from the funding agency." (Guideline 7)

Before or while writing a proposal, it is important to include management of research data in the concept. Measures for making data reusable by others often have a high chance of being funded. In addition, funding for data management enables you to achieve a higher level of data organization and quality in your project than would otherwise be possible and increases the overall efficiency of your research.

Requirements for funding proposals

Depending on the funding agency, there are different research data management requirements. General information can be found on the TUdata website

Costs for research data

The costs incurred for appropriate measures, e.g. to increase reusability, can be requested in part in the funding applications depending on the respective funding program. Part of your calculation should be:

  • the expected data volume and correlated costs for storage during the project, e.g. HRZ prices for Fileservice
  • costs for additional hardware and software
  • service costs, if additional data services are needed, e.g. digitalization of analogue data or professional data curation
  • estimated costs for archiving or publication of research data
  • estimated person months for data preparation
  • other examples for costs might be taken from "How to identify and assess Research Data Management (RDM) costs" by OpenAIRE.

The DFG, for example, put together information on which resources can be funded. Local data backup and archiving are seen as responsibility of the institution and cannot be funded. However, additional measures to make data reusable by others can be funded, e.g. personnel expenses for preparing research data for reuse and / or publication in a data repository.

RDM staff in CRCs, LOEWE and similar

In the context of Collaborative Research Centres (CRC) or similar joint projects we recommend to implement as a minimum a Data Steward or Research Data Manager (postdoc, 1 FTE) for the coordination and alignment of RDM processes, supported by additional policies and measurements in the project. In these cases, resources for RDM do not only have a very good chance of being funded, but absence of appropriate measures to ensure good RDM may negatively impact the proposals overall chances of success.

Depending on how data-intensive the research is, additional personnel, e.g. for a dedicated RDM research project, can be added as well.