Data Management Plan Requirements and Instructions
Requirements
NOAA requires that environmental data collected or created under NOAA-funded grants or cooperative agreements be made discoverable by and accessible to the general public. Data must be made publicly accessible in a timely fashion, typically within two years, free of charge or at minimal cost that is no more than the cost of distribution to the user, except where limited by law, regulation, policy, or national security requirements. Data should be available in at least one machine-readable format, preferably a widely-used or open-standard format, and should also be accompanied by machine-readable documentation (metadata), preferably based on widely-used or international standards.
Applicants are strongly encouraged to use existing data centers and data portals to archive and disseminate their data. Submission of data to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is one way to meet this requirement (see Options below for more details). Note: NCEI is not obligated to accept all submissions and may charge a fee, particularly for large or unusual datasets. The costs of data preparation, accessibility and/or archiving, if any, should be included in your proposal budget.
For non-open access scholarly articles, applicants are required to submit the final pre-publication manuscripts of scholarly articles produced entirely or primarily with NOAA funding to the NOAA Institutional Repository after acceptance, and no later than upon publication. Such manuscripts shall be made publicly available by NOAA one-year after publication by the journal.
Proposal Instructions
As part of the application process, applicants are required to submit a Data Management Plan (DMP) that describes how these requirements will be satisfied. NCCOS is not offering specific technical guidance. Proposals are to describe their proposed approach. Use of open-standard formats and methods is encouraged.
DMPs submitted as part of the proposal package should be less than two pages in length and include descriptions of the:
- Types of environmental data and information expected to be created during the course of the project and the tentative date by which that data will be shared;
- Standards to be used for data/metadata format and content;
- Methods for providing data access, including longer-term archiving of these data;
- Approximate total volume of data to be collected; and
- Prior experience in making such data accessible.
Applicants are encouraged to include the costs of project-level data management in the proposal budget. This can include: coordinating, organizing, documenting, formatting, or otherwise preparing datasets for submission to NOAA or non-NOAA data facilities; establishing and maintaining data access tools and services and related metadata. It also may include managing non-digital data that are not required to be made publicly accessible, including laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer review reports, communications with colleagues, or physical objects, such as laboratory specimens.
DMPs should reflect archiving Option A, B, and/or C as stated below. Note: non-digital data are not required to be made publicly accessible.
Option A: For the majority of oceanographic and ecological data, except non-digital data as described above, funding recipients are expected to submit data to the NOAA/NCEI for long-term preservation, which will provide public access, archiving, discovery metadata meeting NOAA standards and formats, and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
Option B: For any other data not appropriate for submission to NOAA/NCEI, funding recipients are expected to submit data to an appropriate long-term data facility (e.g., National Institutes of Health’s GenBank for genomics data) that preserves data, properly manages archived data to assure their quality, mints DOIs, and makes archived data and related information available to users in a timely and efficient manner. Funding recipients should submit discovery metadata meeting NOAA standards and formats documenting these non-NOAA data archives to the NCCOS Program Manager.
Option C: For limited-release data that are limited by law, regulation, policy, security requirements, commercial or international agreements, or valid technical considerations, funding recipients may request permission not to make data publicly accessible from the Program Manager.
Other Items of Note
NOAA may, at its own discretion, make publicly visible the DMP from funded proposals, or use information from the DMP to produce a formal metadata record and include that metadata in a Catalog to indicate the pending availability of new data.
The contents of the DMP (or absence thereof), and past performance regarding such plans, will be considered as part of the proposal review process. Failing or delaying to make environmental data accessible in accordance with the submitted DMP, unless authorized by the NOAA Program, may lead to enforcement actions, and will be considered by NOAA when making future award decisions. Funding recipients are responsible for ensuring these conditions are also met by sub-recipients and subcontractors.
Data produced under this award and made available to the public must be accompanied by the following statement: “These data and related items of information have not been formally disseminated by NOAA, and do not represent any agency determination, view, or policy.”
Visit the Information for Recipients section of the Funding Opportunities page for more information on data requirements for recipients.
Definitions
Environmental data are recorded and derived observations and measurements of the physical, chemical, biological, geological, and geophysical properties and conditions of the oceans, atmosphere, space environment, sun, and solid earth, as well as, correlative data such as socio- economic data, related documentation, and metadata. Digital audio or video recordings of environmental phenomena (such as animal sounds or undersea video) are included in this definition. Numerical model outputs are included in this definition, particularly if they are used to support the conclusion of a peer-reviewed publication. Data collected in a laboratory or other controlled environment, such as measurements of animals and chemical processes, are included in this definition.
Timely fashion means data accessibility must occur no later than publication of a peer-reviewed article based on the data, or two years after the data are collected and verified, or two years after the original end date of the grant (not including any extensions or follow-on funding), whichever is soonest, unless a delay has been authorized by the NOAA funding program.