Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy

On March 15, Canada’s three federal research funding agencies—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) launched the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy (“RDM Policy”).

The RDM Policy will be implemented with a phased in, incremental approach. The RDM Policy puts emphasis on the FAIR principles, cybersecurity safeguards, and strategies to strengthen the capacity of Indigenous Peoples’ ownership, control, access and possession of Indigenous data. There are three key requirements outlined in the policy:

• Institutional RDM Strategy: By March 1, 2023, universities and research hospitals must have in place an institutional RDM strategy that supports sound practices, as outlined in the RDM Policy.
• Data Management Plans: By Spring 2022, data management plans will be required components of grant applications to an initial set of Tri-Agency programs.
• Data Deposit: In addition to any existing sponsor requirements, grant recipients will be required to archive all digital research data, metadata and code that directly support research conclusions in journal publications and pre-prints into a digital repository. This requirement for data deposit will be implemented after institutional strategies have been reviewed by the Tri-Agency.

McGill University welcomes and fully supports this new policy and has established support for researchers for research data management through a collaboration between the Office of the Vice-Principal (Research and Innovation), Libraries, and IT Services, including:

• a Digital Research Services Hub for consultation and assistance with data management plans, research software, and advanced research computing;
• an institutional data repository (McGill Dataverse) for data sharing and archiving managed by the McGill Libraries;
• McGill IT’s cybersecurity campaign - Secure Your Journey to promote best practices in protecting University’s data and computer systems;
• drop-in Q&A sessions on data collection, storage, privacy and security for researchers, co-hosted by McGill VP-RI, McGill Libraries and McGill IT Services.

For more information, please contact our Digital Research Services Team at drs [at] mcgill.ca or our Research Data Management Specialist at rdm.library [at] mcgill.ca.