NIH Guidance on DMSP Budgeting

The Supplemental Information to the NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing: Allowable Costs for Data Management and Sharing outlines categories of allowable NIH costs associated with data management and sharing. Reasonable, allowable costs can be budgeted in three categories:

1. Curating data and developing supporting documentation
2. Local data management considerations; and
3. Preserving and sharing data through established repositories

All allowable costs submitted in budget requests must be incurred (e.g., curation fees, data repository fees) during the performance period, even for scientific data and metadata preserved and shared beyond the award period.

See Budgeting for Data Management and Sharing for examples of allowable costs and how to request funds in the proposal.

Make sure to check out the Budgeting FAQs on the sharing.nih.gov site: information is updated frequently.

How to Estimate Costs

The National Academies (NAP) publication Life-Cycle Decisions for Biomedical Data: The Challenge of Forecasting Costs (2020) contains helpful information including:

• NAP Cost Driver Template: workbook on cost drivers for data management and sharing (docx)
• NAP Assessing Research Data Costs: checklist for Administrators at Research Institutions (pdf) that raises points to consider
• UVA Data Storage Costs: guide to research data preservation and archiving options through UVA ITS

These are not endorsed by NIH specifically for the DMS Policy, but may be helpful for budgeting:

NIMH Data Archive (NDA)’s budgeting guide – and their NDA Data Submission Cost Estimation Tool. The tool is a spreadsheet that is NDA specific, but it has line-by-line examples of tasks, and how many PI hours and Data Manager hours would be involved at X salary to come up with a Total Cost for the project.

OpenAire Guide. This is European-based, so figures would need translation to USD, but in their Estimating Costs RDM Tool they give examples such as "formatting and organizing data can be done by a student assistant at level 1* salary" or "data manager at level 2* salary". But they don’t give estimated time these tasks would take. Their infographic on what to budget for may be useful (includes info on issues like direct vs. indirect costs which came up in the webinar). 

Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative: Research Update #2—Activities for Making Research Data Publicly Accessible was pointed out – their Report (PDF) has a grid of DMS Phase, DMS Activity, and DMS tasks for Researchers. Note - no dollar amount examples for any of them.

NIH issued the Data Management and Sharing (DMS) policy (effective January 25, 2023) to promote the sharing of scientific data. Read more at sharing.nih.gov, but in short, under the DMS policy, NIH expects that investigators and institutions:

• Plan and budget for the managing and sharing of data
• Submit a DMS plan for review when applying for funding
• Comply with the approved DMS plan

For a good overview of what data management and sharing entails, see Sharing Data: The Basics from NCI/NIH.

To have a librarian review your DMS plan, please complete this request form.