Community

DMPonline user groups

We value understanding how the community is using our tool and how we can improve to meet their needs. We run 3 - 4 user groups per year where we bring together our users for a half day meeting. Contact us if you are interested in attending.

We also have a DMPonline community listserv where you can raise questions and discuss with other users.

Utrecht, January 2020 

Discussion focused on the create plan wizard and template selection. We were joined the European Commission, NWO, ZonMW and FCCN so also consider funder use cases.

• Agenda with links to slides
• Blog post summary

London, September 2019

Discussion focused on demonstrating the conditional questions and new features requested at the Spring user group. We also discussed a number of small usability improvements to the tool.

• Agenda with links to slides
• Blog post summary

Amsterdam & Manchester, March-April 2019

Discussion focused on the API and conditional questions.We also considered adding a school/department flag and a separate reviewer permission to support sharing of DMPs across teams of data stewards.

• Blog post summary

Developer community 

Together with our partners at the California Digital Library, we run the open source DMPRoadmap codebase. A growing number of organisations have installed the code and contribute to the developer community. If you add features, please send a Pull Request so we can consider adding them into the common code. 

• DMPRoadmap codebase
• Developer slack community - email DMPonline@dcc.ac.uk with a note of the address to add

Machine actionable DMPs

DMPonline exports to json and our data model maps to the RDA common standard for DMPs. We also have a number of integrations, for example with the OpenAIRE API listing grant IDs and the RDA metadata standards directory. All of these features make it easier to reuse the content in DMPs and integrate with other services. You can structure the questions in your template to define values for storage locations and data volumes. This allows you to set triggers to get alerts and also to use the API to mine this information.

We continually gather requirements to prioritise integrations and have published use cases for machine actionable DMPs. Key resources we have authored and contributed to are listed below.

• Machine actionable Data Management Plans - a 2017 paper on user requirements published in RIOjournal 
• 10 principles for machine-actionable Data Management Plans - a 2019 paper published in PLOS Computational Biology
• RDA Common Standard for DMPs - an application profile to express information in a machine-actionable way
• A landscape survey of Active DMPs - presentation given at the 13th IDCC in Barcelona
• ActiveDMPs.org - a community website profiling latest requirements, events and tool developments
• Implementing the maDMP standard in DMPonline - presentation by Sam Rust at the RDA webinar on DMPs [ideally we would cut out Sam's bit of the video and link to that. Is that feasible?]

If you would like to engage in these initiatives we encourage you to join the related Research Data Alliance groups

• Active DMPs Interest Group, co-chaired by Kevin Ashley and Sarah Jones of DCC
• Exposing DMPs Working Group, co-chaired by Angus Whyte of DCC