For collaborative work with research data, centrally coordinated planning of research data management and all workflows is even more important than for individual research due to the large number of participants and institutions involved. From the very beginning, the basic responsibilities and the handling of the data generated in the research project should be defined in a project policy - independent of any existing institutional or disciplinary policies.

The specific measures should be defined in a data management plan (DMP), which is ideally oriented towards the data life cycle. In addition to statements on the handling of research data throughout the project duration, this plan contains information on the specific requirements of the funding organisation, statements on copyright and intellectual property rights of the research data, confidentiality agreements as well as guidelines on how to handle the data at the end of the project, such as data publication or destruction. The data management plan is important for making data interpretable and reusable for third parties and is therefore now expected by many third-party funding organisations (DFG, EU Horizon 2020, Volkswagen Foundation) for the allocation of funds from certain funding lines as part of a funding application.