Data management plans: A review

With increasing world-wide emphasis on providing access to research data, data management plans (DMPs) have emerged as the expected way for researchers to formalise and communicate their intentions to stakeholders, including to their funders. This review paper focuses on a thematic analysis and presentation of empirical research on DMPs, a literature that is surprisingly limited, likely due to the young age of the field. Research shows that, despite the benefits associated with data sharing, DMPs have potential that is not being realised to the fullest. Researchers in scholarly communication and information science primarily have evaluated DMPs using text analysis methodologies, often supplementing them with surveys or interviews. Future study, especially in areas of machine-actionable DMPs is promising; such research is needed to further explore how DMPs can best be utilised to support data sharing.