#  1\. INTRODUCTION

Effective research data management is an important and valuable component of
the responsible conduct of research. This document provides a data management
plan (DMP), which describes how data will be collected, organised, managed,
stored, secured, back- uped, preserved, and where applicable, shared.

In the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation _Horizon 2020_ a
pilot action on open access to research data will be implemented. Open access
can be defined as the practice of providing on-line access to scientific
information that is free of charge to the enduser and that is re-usable. In
the context of research and innovation, 'scientific information' can refer to
(i) peer-reviewed scientific research articles (published in scholarly
journals) or (ii) research data (data underlying publications, curated data
and/or raw data).

Moreover, H2020 projects are required to develop a Data Management Plan (DMP),
in which they will specify what data will be open and define the details of
their handling. DMP can be divided into two main categories:

  * Utilization of research data that are generated (and collected) within the context of the project 

  

  * Dissemination of the scientific results generated from the project. 

  

Since in terms of disseminating VITAL results, the PMT will focus on applying
–where applicable- the gold open-access model, the rest of the document
focuses on the first of the formerly mentioned category, i.e. the management
plan of the research data generated within the research context of VITAL.

The scope of the current DMP is to make the VITAL data easily:

  * Discoverable 

  

  * Accessible 

  

  * Assessable and intelligible 

  

  * Useable beyond the original purpose for which it was collected 

  

  * Interoperable to specific quality standards 

  

#  2\. ETHICS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

##  2.1. Ethics

Overall, the VITAL project consortium confirms that it will assure that if the
items mentioned hereunder are applicable to the project they will be conformed
to:

  * Directive 95/46/EC (Protection of personal data) 

  

  * Opinion 23/05/2000 of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies concerning ‘Citizens Rights and New Technologies: A European Challenge’ and specifically those relating to: 

    * ICT (Protection of privacy and protection against personal intrusion) 

  

    * Ethics of responsibility (Right to information security) 

  

    * Article 15 (Freedom of expression and research and data protection) 

  

  

The project will ensure that the consortium agreement (or addendums thereof)
is constructed to enable such assurances to be formally made and adhered to by
consortium partners.

In addition, with respect to Directive 95/46/EC (Protection of personal of
data), individual work packages will be specifically requested to ensure that
any models, specifications, procedures or products also enable the project end
users to be compliant with this directive.

The VITAL partners also will abide by professional ethical practices and
comply with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (c.f.,
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf).

##  2.2. IPR and Knowledge Management Plan

A Consortium Agreement has been signed at an early stage of the project in
order to define the important points necessary to obtain the best possible
management (financial conditions, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR),
planning) of intellectual property. IPR will be managed in line with a
principle of equality of all the partners towards the foreground knowledge and
in full compliance with the general Commission policies regarding ownership,
exploitation rights and confidentiality. In general, knowledge, innovations,
concepts and solutions that are not going to be protected by patent
applications by the participants will be made public after agreement between
the partners, to allow others to benefit from these results and exploit them.
However, where results require patents to show the impact of VITAL, we will
perform freedom to operate searches to determine that this does not infringe
on patents belonging to others. Additionally, we will consider the
intellectual property rights belonging to third parties and consortium members
to ensure no infringement on intellectual property rights. The unified
consortium agreement will be used as a reference for all IPR cases. The
Consortium Agreement identifies the background intellectual property of each
of the partners that may be used to achieve the project objectives. The
corresponding list of patents at the disposal of the partners for the duration
of the project is also included.

The principle of territoriality for industrial property will be applied within
the VITAL project and the best instrument (several national patent
registrations, European Patent application or an international application)
will be selected in each case. Concerning the standards-related activities,
they are considered to be part of the sharable foreground knowledge and
contributing partner(s) are equally owners of the Use and Author Right. Each
partner shall abstain from using or introducing into VITAL any background or
side-ground work that would or might require unexpected licensing of the work.
The basic philosophy of VITAL is to implement an open source policy for most
but not all results. This balances the need to protect the individual
interests of each partner with the need to make a quick and lasting impact on
the wider community. This open source approach to dissemination of VITAL
results, including its prototypes and test environments, will ensure that
critical innovations can be patented in a reasonable way.

The Consortium Agreement will provide rules for handling confidentiality and
IPR to the benefit for the Consortium and its partners. All the project
documentation will be stored electronically and as paper copies. Classified
Documents will be handled according to proper rules with regard to
classification (as described above), numbering and locked storing and
distribution limitations. The policy, that will govern the IPR management in
the scope of VITAL, is driven by the following principles:

###  2.2.1. Ownership of knowledge

  * Knowledge shall be the property of the partner carrying out the work leading to that knowledge. 

  

  * Where several partners have jointly carried out work generating the knowledge and where their respective share of the work cannot be ascertained, they shall have joint ownership of such knowledge. The contractors concerned shall agree amongst themselves the allocation and terms of exercising ownership of that knowledge in accordance with the provisions of this contract. 

  

###  2.2.2. Protection of knowledge

  * Where knowledge is capable of industrial or commercial application, its owner shall provide for its adequate and effective protection, in conformity with relevant legal provisions, including the consortium agreement. 

  

  * Where a partner does not intend to protect or to extend the protection of its knowledge in a specific country or intends to waive the protection of its knowledge, the Commission shall be informed at least 30 days prior to the corresponding deadline. In such a case and where the Commission considers it necessary to protect such knowledge in a particular country, it may, with the agreement of the contractor concerned, adopt protective measures. 

  

###  2.2.3. Use and dissemination

  * The partners shall use or cause to be used the knowledge arising from the project, which they own, in accordance with their interests. The contractors shall set out the terms of use in a detailed and verifiable manner, notably in the plan for using and disseminating the knowledge. 

  

  * If dissemination of knowledge would not adversely affect its protection or its use, the contractors shall ensure that it is disseminated within a period of two years after the end of the project. 

  

###  2.2.4. Access rights

The access rights for execution of the project are the following:

  * Project partners shall enjoy access rights to the knowledge and to the pre-existing know-how, if that knowledge or pre-existing know-how is needed to carry out their own work under that project. Access rights to knowledge shall be granted on a royalty-free basis. Access rights to pre-existing know-how shall be granted on a royalty-free basis, unless otherwise agreed before signature of the contract. 

  

  * Subject to its legitimate interests, the termination of the participation of a project partner shall in no way affect its obligation to grant access rights pursuant to the previous paragraph to the other contractors until the end of the project. 

  

The access rights for use of knowledge are the following:

  * Partners shall enjoy access rights to knowledge and to the pre-existing know how, if that knowledge or pre-existing know-how is needed to use their own knowledge. Access rights to knowledge shall be granted on a royalty-free basis, unless otherwise agreed before signature of the contract. Access rights to pre-existing know-how shall be granted under fair and non-discriminatory conditions to be agreed. 

  

  * Subject to the partners’ legitimate interests, access rights may be requested under the conditions laid down in the previous paragraph until two years after the end of the project or after the termination of the participation of a partner, whichever falls earlier, unless the partners concerned agree on a longer period. 

  

The consortium agreement that will be signed before the end of the contract
negotiations with the Commission will gather the basic aspects of the IPR
management:

  * Confidentiality 

  

  * Ownership of results / joint ownership of results / difficult cases (i.e. pre-existing know-how so closely linked with result difficult to distinguish pre-existing know-how and result) 

  

  * Legal protection of results (patent rights) 

  

  * Commercial exploitation of results and any necessary access right 

  

  * Commercial obligation 

  

  * Relevant Patents, know-how, and information Sublicense 

  

  * Pre-existing know-how excluded from contract 

  

Nevertheless, many specific IPR cases, that will need a concrete solution from
the bases previously fixed, may exist. In these conflict situations, the
Project Management Team will be the responsible to arbitrate a solution. In
case of any members of this Board is directly affected by the conflict, it
will not participate in the arbitration process.

#  3.STRUCTURE OF VITAL DMP

Following the template recommended by the EC [1], the Data Management Plan
(DMP) includes the following major components, as described in the figure
below.

Data management

plan

Data set

reference and

name

Data set descrip1on

Standards and

metadata

Data sharing

Archiving and

preserva1on

**Figure 3-1: Structure (template) of the data management plan**

Specifically, in VITAL, the aforementioned components are applicable as
summarized below:

VITAL

Data management

Reference and name

VITAL [Name] [Type] [Place]

Date] [Owner]

[

Target User]

[

Descrip1on

“Traffic meas. experiments,

Nice, June. 2015

Planned publica1on in

NOMS”

Metadata

-­‐ 

Text file, if not part of

the data file

Sharing:

Zenodo.org integrated

with Github

Archiving:

Github (through

-­‐ 

Zenodo.org)

**Figure 3-2: Main components of the VITAL Data Management Plan**

#  4\. DATA SET REFERENCE AND NAME

The following structure is proposed for VITAL data set identifier:

VITAL [Name] [Type] [Place] [Date] [Owner] [Target User] Where

  * “Name” is a short name for the data. 

  

  * “Type” describes the type of data (e.g. code, publication, measured data). 

  

  * “Place” describe the place the data were produced. 

  

  * “Data” is the date in format “YYYY-MM-DD”. 

  

  * “Owner” are the owner or owners of the data (if exist) 

  

  * [Optional] “Target user” is the target audience of the data. 

  

  * “_” (underscore) is used as the separator between the fields. 

  

For example,

“VITAL_Field_Experiment_data_Trento_2015-06-30_Create-Net_Internal.dat” is a
data file from a field experiment in Trento, Italy from 2015-06-30 made and
owned by Create-Net with extension .dat (MATLAB). More information about the
data is provided in the metadata (see the following section).

All the data fields in the identifier above, apart from the target user, are
mandatory. If owner cannot be specified, “Unspecified-owner” should be
indicated.

#  5.DATA SET DESCRIPTION AND METADATA

The previous section defined a data set identifier. The data set description
is essentially an expanded description of the identifier with more details.

The data set description is organized as the metadata in the similar way as
the identifier but with more details and, depending on the file format, will
be either incorporated as a part of the file or as a separate file (in its
simplest form) in the text format. In the case of the separate metadata file,
it will have the same name with suffix “METADATA”.

For example, the metadata file name for the data file from the previous
section will look as follows

“VITAL_Field_Experiment_data_Trento_015-06-30_Create-
Net_Internal_METADATA.txt” The Metadata file can also describe a number of
files (e.g. a number of log files).

The project may consider a possibility to provide the metadata in XML or JSON
formats, if necessary for convenience of parsing and further processing.

The project will develop several data types related to the VNF (Virtual
Network Function) Descriptors, NS (Network Service) Descriptors, VNF
Catalogues, etc., which will be specifically encoded into the metadata format
appropriately in order to have consistency in the description and filtering of
the data types.

#  6.DATA SHARING

VITAL has chosen zenodo.org repository for storing the project data and a
VITAL project account has been created  1  . Zenodo.org is a repository
supported by CERN and the EU OpenAire project  2  , is open, free, searchable
and structured with flexible licensing allowing for storing all types of data:
datasets, images, presentations, publications and software. In addition to
that:

  * The repository has backup and archiving capabilities. 

  

  * The repository allows for integration github.com  3  where the project code will be stored. GitHub provides a free and flexible tool for code developing and storage. 

  

  * Zenodo assigns all publicly available uploads a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to make the upload easily-­‐ and uniquely-­‐citable. 

  

All the above makes Zenodo a good candidate as a _unified_ repository for all
foreseen project data (presentations, publications, code and measurement data)
from VITAL.

Information on using Zenodo by the project partners with application to the
VITAL data will be circulated within the consortium and addressed within the
respective work package (WP6).

The process of making the VITAL data public and publishable at the repository
will follow the procedures described in the Consortium Agreement. For the
code, the project partners will follow the internal “Open Source Management
Process” document.

All the public data of the project will be openly accessible at the
repository. Non-public data will be archived at the repository using the
“closed access” option.

#  7\. ARCHIVING AND PRESERVATION

The Guidelines on Data Management in Horizon 2020 require defining procedures
that will be put in place for long-term preservation of the data and backup.

The zenodo.org repository possesses these archiving capabilities including
backup and will be used to archive and preserve the VITAL project data.

Further, the VITAL project data will also be stored in a project-managed
repository tool, called redmine, which is managed by the project coordinator.
It has flexible live data storage capability. The redmine repository will
directly link to the project website, where access information to different
data types will be provided. This will permit the users and research
collaborators to have easy and convenient access to the project research data.
A GitHub account will be linked to the repository in order to preserve and
backup the software produced in the project.

#  8\. USE OF DMP WITHIN THE PROJECT

The VITAL project partners use this plan as a reference for data management
(naming, providing metadata, storing and archiving) within the project each
time new project data are produced.

The project partners are introduced to the DMP and its use as part of WP6
activities. Relevant questions from partners will also be addressed within
WP6. The work package will also provide support to the project partners on
using Zenodo as the data management tool.

The DMP will be used as a live document in order to update the project
partners about the use, monitoring and updates of the shared infrastructure.