Planning costs (for data storage and processing, APCs, HR, etc.)

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Costs relating to publication or open access dissemination and those for managing and safeguarding data are eligible for funding in most calls for proposals. Assessing these costs in advance means you can fund them, and can reduce any associated costs by adopting FAIR-compliant principles for your data management practices and choices from the outset.

The Digital Republic Law means that author’s versions of articles may be deposited in an open archive after one year. However, this period is sometimes longer than that required by funding bodies (immediate availability under Plan S and for the ANR as of 2022) and does not concern other types of publications (books and conference proceedings).

It is thus necessary from the outset to identify the journals you target, and, where appropriate, to budget for APCs (publication costs), or to plan on discussing with the publisher to reserve publication rights if the journals are not eligible for Plan S.

For data management, various points need to be estimated concerning HR, equipment, software, acquisition, and/or hosting expenses :

  • data volume

  • production: acquisition, transcription, and digitisation

  • data description, cleaning, and documentation

  • formatting and organisation of files, metadata

  • data management: storage and backup, security/access, transfer

  • quality control and responsibility for data management

  • tools for sharing and/or long-term archiving if necessary

  • processing required for sharing where appropriate: obtaining consent, anonymisation, rights management

Tools to help assess costs are available online (links in the right column).

Anticipating and including these questions in the initial processing reduces costs, and reprocessing data can be very time consuming.

Planning and budgeting data management is also part of complying with funding bodies’ requirements without last-minute pressure at the end of the project.