Across North America, effective Research Data Management (RDM) is essential for securing and maintaining grant funding. Funding agencies both in Canada and the United States place a huge emphasis on data security, integrity, and accessibility as critical components of responsible research and a key requirement for funding. Here are five reasons we believe why.
Compliance with Funding Agency Requirements
In Canada, the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC) mandates that institutions implement RDM strategies to maintain funding eligibility. Likewise, in the United States agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) require researchers to submit Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Plans ensuring secure and responsible data handling.
Researchers have learned the hard way that failure to comply with these requirements can result in funding delays, reduced future funding opportunities, and in many cases, loss of grants.
Protecting Sensitive and Confidential Data
Research involving health data, personal information, or proprietary industry information must adhere to stringent data security laws.
In Canada, adherence to PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) and provincial laws (e.g., Ontario’s PHIPA) is required. PIPEDA for example sets the ground rules for how private organizations collect, use, protect, and disclose personal information.
In the US on the other hand, any federally funded research must be compliant with both HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act), as well as the newly enacted NIST 800-171 requirements that went into effect on January 25, 2025. These new requirements cover any federally-funded research managing Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations.
So as you can see, by following structured data security guidelines, proper data security prevents breaches, ethical violations, and reputational damage that can impact future funding opportunities.
Ensuring Long-Term Data Accessibility
Funding agencies across North America expect research data to be well-documented, preserved, and accessible for future verification and use.
At myLaminin, we believe researchers have options when it comes to research repositories. There are many federally-sponsored, institutional, domain-specific, and private-sector tools and repository options. The selection of the right repository however is dependent on the nature of the research, the number of locations involved in data collection, the tools required for analysis, the overriding research methodology, team member locations, and their respective roles.
In the end, properly managed data increases research impact, research repeatability, and improves the chances of future grant renewals.
Enhancing Credibility and Trust
A robust RDM framework facilitates data collection and minimizes errors, fraud risks, and data loss, which could otherwise jeopardize research validity. In our view, funders prefer researchers and institutions that demonstrate rigorous data stewardship and adherence to ethical data handling.
Supporting Open Science and Collaboration
It should be noted that many grants require both data sharing and transparency while balancing intellectual property protection. For example, U.S. initiatives like NIH's Data Sharing Policy encourages researchers to openly share federally funded data, while in Canada, the Tri-Agency Policy promotes open science, ensuring data is preserved and shared appropriately.
Indigenous data sovereignty also requires support of the OCAP principles, (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) and while OCAP does not contradict open science rather, it enhances inclusivity, ethics, and collaboration. A respectful approach allows Indigenous knowledge to contribute to global research without compromising community rights and autonomy.
With that said, secure research data management enables controlled access and fosters collaboration without compromising sensitive information.
In Conclusion
We believe a well-designed research data management platform helps researchers to create a robust strategy for handling research data while increasing their chances of securing grant funding. The ideal RDM repository should be secure, adaptable to various research domains, and more importantly, flexible enough to support different data types, storage locations, distributed teams, and role-based access thereby making regulatory compliance seamless and efficient.
By ensuring you comply with funding agency policies, promoting the safeguarding of sensitive information, and promoting open science, you can boost your credibility, streamline the funding process, and contribute to high-impact, reproducible research.
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Deanne Bassili (article author) is the COO of myLaminin, a secure research data management platform for academia using blockchain and web3 technologies to secure sensitive research data and reduce operational inefficiencies for principal investigators, their team members, external collaborators, research legal services, research ethics boards, research librarians, IT, and administrators.
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