A Data Management and Sharing Plan

I had a hankering for almond cake recently. I could have experimented with how to create an almond cake: testing flours and leaveners to try to make something edible. But why? There was no need to reinvent the wheel - I could start with a recipe.

Similarly, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every part of your grant. Some forms are boilerplate (e.g., data management and sharing plans, facilities). It’s important to adapt and update the forms for your grant. But, the forms don’t need to be “from scratch” the way your one pager needs to be.

For instance, here’s my data management and sharing plan for a secondary data analysis grant to NIH. If you’re working on a secondary data analysis grant for NIH, you can copy this structure, updating it for your data types. As another example, if you’re working on a facilities form, ask someone at your institution if they can share their facilities form to the same funder. Your facilities are the same (i.e., you’re at the same institution). You still need to adapt the form to highlight resources you would use. But the point is, you don’t have to start from scratch.

A few pointers:

• Always read and follow the rules for the forms. Rules vary by funder, and you need to be compliant.
• It’s OK to ask for samples. Well connected investigators have access to samples. You should too. Key people to ask: research administrators, people you have a relationship with or helped in the past, research deans. You can cold email colleagues, but try the other strategies first because it’s easier to predict someone’s reaction when you have a connection. If you do cold email, remember that the worst that usually happens is people ignore you or say no. In those cases, you are no worse off than before. In fact, you’re better off because you know the person can’t share resources right now.
• Always adapt forms to your grant. When you get a sample form, you must make it specific to your grant. That’s what makes forms convincing to funders and reviewers. You are not asking for samples to copy. You are asking for samples to see how to make the forms convincing.

This strategy above is one way to gain momentum in your grant writing (p. 88 in The Grant Writing Guide). Boilerplate forms can be completed at your worst writing times (e.g., after a heavy lunch). Save your best writing energy for grant pieces that require focus (e.g., the one pager).

If you know someone who might find today’s post helpful, would you mind forwarding it to them? Thanks for reading and believing that scholars deserve support for incredible ideas.

Betty

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P.S. Here’s my finished almond cake. I used this recipe. Next time I’d adapt it to have a stronger almond flavor. A nice feature of the recipe is it makes two cakes at once. We ate one and froze the other.