Project Homepage - Main Repository - Documentation File Template
This repository contains a template for to help you create a documentation file. A Documentation File (sometimes referred to as README file) has information about datasets that are made publicly available in data repositories.
Go HERE for more detailed instructions
Download our repository repository which contains the template. Open the template in a text editor. Next fill in your own information and delete the instructions. If you want to use Github Pages upload the edited file into your own repository and enable Github Pages.
Created by Clara Liebot Lorente and Mark Landon for the Oregon State Research Data Services.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons No Rights Reserved (CC0) license.
A Documentation File (sometimes referred to as README file) has information about datasets that are made publicly available in data repositories. This document ensures that others have all the information they need to understand and potentially reuse the data, it identifies the authors of the dataset so that they can be contacted if needed, and clarify the terms of use of the data.
This Data Management Templates Project is aimed to anyone create and distribute various types of documents. Our templates can be used for any research projects, large and small, of any disciplines.
Whomever is responsible for data management decisions in the project, will probably be the one interested in using this template. In many cases this person will be the Principal Investigator with the help of the research team. In large projects it may be a data manager. A grad student in charge of his/her research project may want to use this too.
We have tried to make this template as general as possible. It is possible that these template will fit some fields more than others. If you have feedback to give us open an issue or send us an e-mail to ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu, we are very interested in hearing whether this is useful for you!
No, it does not need to be in GitHub. There are a few reasons why we have decided to host these templates GitHub:
- Because you can easily clone our templates, edit them, and have a website with your Data Management Plan Implementation. Having a public Data Management Plan Implementation or other documents in the form of a website will help your research group because it will make your practices transparent, and because everybody in your research group will be able to consult them easily from wherever they are.
- Because it is a tool that many researchers are already familiar with. If you are not one of these researchers, we have created guidelines to help you through the process.
- Because you can edit websites with Markdown. You do not need to know html or other programming languages. Markdown is generally intuitive and easy to learn for most researchers. We have also included a few guidelines for Markdown editing in this template, just in case.
However, there are many reasons why GitHub may not be the right choice for a research project. This template is also accessible as a Word document, a pdf, and a LaTeX document.
Yes! Github Pages allows your documents to appear as webpages but simply hosting Github without pages also works. This maybe a better option if there are concerns about the privacy of your information.
Please, let us know! Write us an e-mail at ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu or open an issue. We may be able to improve the templates in the future.
These templates can be changed as much as you need, so hopefully this will still be somewhat useful to help implement create the documents for your research project.
These templates are published under a CC0 license. You are not expected to give attribution, but we will apreciate it if you do. You can include a line to your Data Management Plan or to the readme of your repository saying "This DMP has been generated using the template developed by Clara Llebot Lorente and Mark Landon, working for Research Data Services at the Oregon State University Library. https://github.com/landonma/Data-Managment-Templates-Project"
We have writen these templates as generally as possible so that they are useful to the maximum number of people. However, the guidance documents have been written with Oregon State University in mind, so that they are especially useful for researchers of that institution. If you have suggestions about how to improve the templates or the guidance documents so that they are more broadly useful, please open an issue or send an e-mail to ResearchDataServices@oregonstate.edu