Policies of research funding organisations and publishers

Depending on the research funding organisation and project, requirements may vary. You can find an overview of the requirements of many international research funders on SHERPA/JULIET.

The research data policies of the major research funding organisations for Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) are briefly described below.

The DFG recommends that data created in DFG projects are made available to third parties as quickly as possible and are preserved for a period of at least 10 years. The project-specific costs incurred by subsequent usage of the research data can be requested as part of the project (see guidelines for applications).
Since 01.08.2019 the new DFG codex “Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice” is available. Universities will have to comply with the 19 guidelines in order to stay eligible for DFG funding. Issues relating to research data management are addressed in guidelines 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 17.
The instructions for project proposals deal with research data management in section 2.4 “Handling of research data”. In particular, the issue of sharing and archiving data produced during the project has to be addressed. This includes documentation and the choice of (meta-)data formats. DFG recommends to consider established data repositories as an option for providing access to the data. Please also consider the new DFG checklist.
Furthermore, there is a growing number of additional guidelines and recommendations for specific research subjects. These can be found along with best-practice examples on the DFG homepage on data handling. These usually contain some additional aspects that have to be discussed in all grant applications.
Please keep in mind that certain funding programs have additional requirements. For example, applications for the Collaborative Research Centres (CRC) program need to present their research data management in some detail in section 1.2.2 of the grant application as well as in section 1.3.3 where the support by FAU structures (RRZE, CDI …) should be mentioned. Note that CRCs with a data related information infrastructure project should discuss data management aspects in some detail in the corresponding sections.

For Horizon Europe grant proposals, many of the application templates (see e.g. item “Methodology” in the standard form RIA IA) include an item on data management. In particular, this should address how the FAIR criteria are implemented. These criteria are also explicitly listed in the forms. In most Horzion Europe templates, the maximal length of the section is limited to  ½ to 1 page. The European Commission provides an official Word template.

All projects funded under Horizon Europe are required to submit a data management plan as a deliverable no later than six months after the start of funding. The EC provides an official Word template for this purpose. For assistance, you can contact the FAU research data team via forschungsdaten@fau.de.

Researchers who receive funding from the Wellcome Trust also need a data management plan and can request the costs incurred by the creation thereof as part of the project (see Policy on Data Management and Sharing).

For projects which receive annual funding of USD 500,000 or more, publication of research data is a mandatory requirement. The data must be published by a publishing company after receiving confirmation of publication of the interpretive results (papers, articles). More information can be found on these sites:

Researchers are expected to share the primary data collected or created in the course of the project for at most incremental costs and within a reasonable time frame (see Data Management for NSF Engineering Directorate Proposals and Awards).

Some publishers have also established basic principles of data availability which require provision of the data and filing in specific repositories for some data. Please be sure to account for possible costs in project applications.