How to Write a Strong Proposal

Due to the competitive nature and limit on resources available, there are several key criteria a proposal should address to increase the likelihood of receiving a data allocation.

Describe the community the data will serve.

What is the size of the user community?
What discipline(s) will the data serve?

Describe the importance of the data to the community.

Does the data serve as a standard digital reference set?
What is the demand by the community for the data?

Provide any relevant usage statistics.

Provide a detailed summary as to the size of your requested allocation.

If the collection is static in nature, provide file counts, average files size, and total needed to house the collection.
For collections that change over time, detail the maximum of space required and how the data changes over time. For example, the project may require 10TB for its initial upload, followed by 2TB uploaded each year for 3 years, totaling 16TB.

Explain the importance of a data resource allocation to your project’s objectives.

Detail the current resources available to the project and why they are not sufficient.

Describe the type of data in the collection.

Is it reproducible? For example, is the data real-time observational data or the result of a computation?
What is the data format?
How is the data currently being stored?

Is the data request in conjunction with a compute request?

Please list the PI on the compute request if different from the data request.
Describe the expected usage.

Include the means of data access.

How will the community gain access to the data?
What are the current and planned means of access?
Provide relevant usage statistics for the current and/or planned means of access.

See the Review Criteria page for the general outline of expectations for data allocation proposals.