1. Building a cross-institutional
data management plan
or:
what could possibly go wrong?
Steve Van Tuyl
Data Services Librarian
Carnegie Mellon University - University Libraries
svantuyl@andrew.cmu.edu
www.cmu.edu/research/data-management

2. GlueX Experiment:
30+ Institutions
1 National Lab
1 Spokesperson (not in charge)
15 Petabytes/year
0 Data Management Plans

3. AND THEN WE TOLD THEM
TO CREATE A CONSISTENT DATA
MANAGEMENT PLAN THAT APPLIES TO ALL
COLLABORATORS

4. “What?! You’re sharing
research data outside of the
institution!?”
- The Lawyers

5. What could possibly go wrong?
In theory, the major collaborating institutions are on the
hook for:
• Responsibility management
• Infrastructure management
• Intellectual property
• Data ownership
• Export controls
• Etc.
We have a hard enough
time doing this WITHIN
our institution…

6. “You could argue that the field has
suffered from [a lack of data sharing].
We all could have gone back and
looked at the Mark II data and found
cool stuff there if that wasn’t so frickin’
impossible”
- Jefferson Lab Staff Scientist

7. “We’re really interested to see what you
come up with because we don’t know
anyone who has tried to do this before”
- Research compliance officer at CMU