How you store your data matters. Even after you publish your article, your data needs to be accessible and usable for the long term. This is so that other researchers can reproduce and build upon your work. Rigorous data management practices make your data discoverable and easy to use, promote a strong foundation for reproducibility, and increase your likelihood of citations.

Before you begin your study, you need a thorough and robust data management plan. It should describe how and what data will be created, outline data sharing and preservation plans, and specify any restrictions that should be applied.

To start, check if your funder or institution offers a template you can adapt. If your institution or funder does not already offer a template or requirements, consider starting with one of the following open resources:

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC), is a world-leading centre of expertise in digital information curation and building research data management skills, and provides a thorough overview of data management plans if you are starting from scratch.

According to the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) - a global registry of research data repositories - a repository is an online platform for researchers to store data, code, and other research outputs. Research data refers to information generated by research activities such as, through experiments, measurements, surveys, or interviews. Depositing your data in a publicly accessible, recognized repository ensures that your dataset continues to be available to both humans and machines in a usable form.

The FAIR data principles (standing for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) are a set of community-designed guidelines to provide measurable, consistent data standards for data sharing and increase data reusability.