Data management costing
Data management costing
An important part of data management planning is costing the resources needed to implement good data practices. These include people’s time, equipment, infrastructure, and tools to manage, document, organise, store, and provide access to data. This time should be costed into the application.
On average, it is recommended that two to three weeks be costed into a typical two-year research grant application. However, owing to the disparate nature of research and data creation, we cannot provide advice on the exact costs likely to be incurred in data preparation. There are two approaches to costing data management.
Approach 1
Estimate costs for all data-related activities throughout the project, for the entire data lifecycle, from data creation and analysis to storage, sharing, and long-term preservation.
Approach 2
Focus only on the resources required to preserve and share your data beyond the original research team.
Data management costing tool
The UK Data Service has developed a simple activity-based costing tool that can be used if taking Approach 2 (above) to costing data management in the social sciences.
The tool lists a series of data management activities and topics considered to be pertinent for data sharing. Comments and suggestions are given for each topic to help you decide whether you need additional resources for a particular data management activity with indicative costs.
Access data management costing tool and checklist.
When using the data management costing tool or assessing the costs for research data management, you may find the following resources and guidance helpful: