The sharing requirement of data management plans may be satisfied in a number of ways. Individual investigators and researchers can choose their personal websites as a distribution medium, the investigator’s institution may provide some sharing infrastructure in the form of a web site or archive and researchers can deposit funded data with established repositories such as data centers, to name a few.

Long before researchers were required to develop data management plans for their National Science Foundation (NSF) proposals, they deposited their research data at LDC in accordance with NSF’s long-standing desire that data generated with program funds should be readily accessible at a reasonable cost. Well known data sets in the series include The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (multiple parts), Propbank and Grassfields Bantu Fieldwork.