Creating guidance

Create themed guidance

The basic steps include:

1. Creating a guidance group (you will already have a default guidance group for your organization; it is optional to create additional groups or subgroups, for example, for a specific department)
2. Creating guidance by entering text, assigning one or more themes, and attaching it to a guidance group
3. Publishing the guidance

There are 14 themes that represent the most common topics addressed in data management plans (e.g., Data format, Metadata & documentation, Data repository). Themes work like tags to associate questions and guidance. Questions within a template can be tagged with one or more themes (see the inventory of Funder template themes). Administrators can then create guidance by theme to apply their advice over all templates at once. This also alleviates the need to update guidance each time a new template is released.

For example, most funder templates include a question about file formats. In the screenshot below, the UCSF guidance with the theme "Data format" would appear next to every question across all templates tagged with this theme.

Under the "Guidance list" click the button to "Create guidance"

If you do have a need to provide guidance for specific funders that would not be useful to a wider audience (e.g. if you have specific instructions for applicants to NIH for example), you can do so by adding guidance to a specific question when you customize a template (see Customizing funder templates).