All National Institutes of Healty (NIH) applications submitted after January 25, 2023 will need to comply with the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy. This policy requires researchers to plan for how data will be preserved and shared.

This policy extends the previous requirements for a Data Management Plan (DMP) to describing how data that are collected will be preserved and shared. So at the time of the grant application it’s important for researchers to consider which data will be collected and where they will be deposited.

Guidance for creating a plan

Data Management and Sharing Plan format page (draft of July 2022) - This form shows fields to be filled to provide the required information.

access Vanderbilt’s DMPtool - In the Sign in/Sign up field, use your Vanderbilt institutional email address. This will direct you to a Vanderbilt single sign-on (SSN). For a guided walk-through to create an NIH plan, click Create Plan, type and select National Institutes of Health in the primary funding organization box. That will bring up a dropdown list of templates appropriate for NIH. Select NIH DSMP from the list, then click Create plan. The components of the plan will appear in the Write Plan tab once the project is created. Each section has an example answer that you can use as a template.

Selecting a data repository

Select a repository for your data according to these priorities:

If there is a specific NIH-supported repository for the type of data you are producing, use it. For example, sequence data is deposited in GenBank. List of NIH-supported Scientific Data Repositories
If NIH does not designate a particular repository for the type of data you are producing, it is best to use a repository that is typical for the field to which you data are related. For example, it is typical for social sciences data to be deposited in the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) repository. List of discipline-specific data repositories
If there is no obvious discipline-specific repository suitable for your data, you may deposit your data in one of the generalist repositories. List of well-known generalist repositories. For more details on some of these repositories visit this page