Data producer support

Research data management is an essential part of the research process, helping researchers to organise, protect, document, and preserve data throughout its lifecycle. Good data management practices support research quality, integrity, and reproducibility, while ensuring compliance with legal, ethical, institutional, and funder requirements.

As research funders, publishers, and institutions increasingly encourage or require data sharing, researchers must consider how data will be managed from project planning through to sharing and long-term preservation.

Who this guidance is for

This guidance is for researchers and teams who are preparing data to be shared with others, referred to frequently on these pages as data producers.

This includes anyone who creates or assembles data as part of a project and plans to make it available for reuse. This might involve:

• Collecting new data (for example, through experiments, surveys, or observations).
• Compiling or structuring data from multiple sources.
• Producing new datasets by transforming or analysing existing data.

If you are working with data but not preparing it for sharing or deposit, some of this guidance may be less relevant to your work.

Explore the sections below to navigate data management across every stage of your project lifecycle.