Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A cost entry of EUR 5,000 for repository deposit and curation services in a Horizon Europe DMP.
- Is an instance
A cost entry of USD 12,000 over 5 years for cold storage of large imaging datasets in an NIH plan.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A general project budget without RDM-specific line items.
- Not an instance
A free-text mention of 'storage will be paid by the institution'.
Editorial commentary
A cost element is a line item in a Data Management Plan (DMP) describing a financial commitment associated with data management — repository deposit or curation fees, long-term storage costs, data steward time, or anonymisation and de-identification services are the most common examples. The RDA DMP Common Standard models cost as a typed entity with a value, a currency, and a description, which allows a DMP-recorded cost to be reconciled against the project’s actual grant budget rather than left as a vague aside.
Cost elements matter to a research office specifically because they intersect with grant costing rules: some funders (UKRI’s guidance on direct costing of data management is a commonly cited example) explicitly permit RDM costs to be charged to the grant as a direct cost, but only where they are itemised rather than folded into general overheads. A DMP that mentions “storage will be paid for by the institution” without a costed line item is not usable as budget justification in the way a properly structured cost element is.
How it differs from adjacent DMP concepts
- vs. DMP component — a cost element is one specific type of component; not every component (e.g., a contributor or a host) carries a cost value.
- vs. Sharing commitment (in DMP) — a sharing commitment describes what will happen to a dataset; a cost element is what paying for that outcome is expected to cost.
References
- RDA DMP Common Standards Working Group outputs; UKRI guidance on direct costing of data management.
Also known as
DMP cost line
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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