Cyberinfrastructure facilities information and data management plan resources to help you prepare grant proposals

Facilities statements are required supplemental documents for many NSF proposals, and are often useful in preparing NIH proposals, as well. The Research Technologies division of UITS has prepared an extensive facilities document for use as a starting point in creating your own facilities document. The document prepared is extensive in its coverage of IU cyberinfrastructure, and it is appropriate for you to delete any parts not relevant to your proposal. Similarly, it may be appropriate to add information describing your departmental resources.

See the current IU cyberinfrastructure facilities statement in Google at IU My Drive. Because IU's cyberinfrastructure facilities statement contains competitively sensitive information, only members of the IU community may access it; consequently, you must be signed into your Google at IU account to view the file (see Access Google at IU).

Proposals that include a request for allocated storage space may require the submission of a detailed plan for cost-effective management of your project's data storage needs. Scientific computations and simulations frequently generate immense amounts of data, and depending on the particular type of research you are performing, estimating your project's short- and long-term data storage needs can be challenging.

Generally, you can arrive at a fair estimate of your project's storage needs by asking:

• How much data does a typical experiment generate (and how much of that do you need to archive long-term)?
• How much larger do you expect data sets to grow over the duration of your project?
• How many experiments do you plan to perform?

The following online resources can help you make a comprehensive estimate of your project's storage needs; they also provide guidelines and examples that can help you prepare your data management plan:

• The DMPTool: The Data Management Plan Tool (DMPTool), a service of the University of California Curation Center (UC3), provides templates and step-by-step instructions for preparing data management plans that meet the requirements of specific funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), and in many cases can connect you with data management resources tailored to your specific institution. For more, see:
  • About the DMPTool
  • Funder Requirements
• DataONE Best Practices of Data Management: The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) hosts an online Data Management Skillbuilding Hub, including a Best Practices database, to help researchers learn to effectively work with their data through every stage of the data lifecycle.