13 Funder Policies
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Lesson 13 of 18
Funding bodies may have their own requirements for research data management. Implementing such a policy is seen as a way of endorsing good research practice.
Some funders may require DMPs be submitted as part of their funding applications and/or that data be deposited in a repository upon the completion of the research or the publication of results. Public funding bodies are increasingly adopting policies that make research more available to the public (i.e., through open access publication and data deposit policies), so that research that is publicly funded is publicly available.
This section will focus on the Canadian context, particularly on the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy. The Tri-Agency Councils, made up of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), are federal funding bodies that adopted their RDM policy in March of 2021.
Such research data management requirements have been implemented not only by Canadian funders. For example, the Digital Curation Centre provides an overview of UK funder policies, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has created a compilation of US federal funder requirements. Policies such as these recognize the importance of good RDM. They also connect to larger shifts in research culture and in open science and open scholarship movements.
Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy
The Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy was released on March 15, 2021, and is being implemented in phases. The policy has requirements for institutions and for researchers.
Prior to the policy’s adoption, the Tri-Agencies published a Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management.
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SSHRC Data Archiving Policy
SSHRC had previously implemented a Research Data Archiving Policy in commitment to the principle that research data collected with public funds belongs in the public domain. This policy allowed for researchers to include the costs of preparing data for deposit in their funding applications.
Note that “All research data collected with the use of SSHRC funds must be preserved and made available for use by others within a reasonable period of time. SSHRC considers ‘a reasonable period’ to be within two years of the completion of the research project for which the data was collected” (SSHRC, 2016). However, this policy does recognize that there are circumstances where providing access for secondary analysis may not be possible (e.g., where ethical requirements such as confidentiality of participants needs to be respected).
CIHR & the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications
CIHR had its own open access policy in 2013 with requirements that were included in the 2015 Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications. These requirements apply to any CIHR funded project from 2008 onwards, and some of these CIHR-specific requirements relate to data:
- Data sets must be kept for a minimum of 5 years after the end of the grant, whether the data is published or not.
- Bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data must be deposited in the appropriate public database immediately upon publication of results (see the policy annex for examples of appropriate repositories).
