Looking ahead to 2022 - Using DMPonline as a framework for our institutional RDM guidance

Dan Crane, King's College London

Like most in the RDM community, we’ve had a very busy 2021 at King’s College London. We’ve managed to tick off one major project – the procurement and implementation of our new research data repository, KORDS (King’s Open Research Data System). We’ve also been continuing to adapt to new and ever-changing ways of working in response to the pandemic, and supporting our researchers as they do the same. But with the end of 2021 drawing near, we’re looking ahead to 2022.

Our next project is to review our RDM guidance, particularly in an institutional context – so that we can give researchers practical advice using the resources and support available to them at King’s. One place we provide this guidance is on our webpages, where we structure information in sections similar to that of a data management plan (Plan, Store, Organise, Preserve, Share). But another place where we want to really target this specific institutional guidance is in our guidance in DMPonline. We want to make sure that what we have in there is both up-to-date and actually really useful, so that researchers are given assistance to not only understand the kind of thing to put in each section, but have it be achievable and as specific as possible.  

At the same time, we’ll review our institutional DMP templates for research staff and PhD Students to consider whether the structure of them is the most appropriate and helpful it can be. When not being led by funder requirements, are we using the best topics to help our researchers plan their data management? I think that our templates will probably still reflect most funder templates, but it’s a chance to check our assumptions.

Finally, we then have the question of how to tell our community about DMPonline and the support that we can provide. We were surprised recently when after a training session involving faculty research support staff, who we thought would know all about it, we were told that they hadn’t heard of DMPonline before (but that it looked great, and they would spread the word about it!). Therefore, there’s work still to be done.

So, I don’t have much knowledge to share here, rather a statement of intent. Feel free to ask me in 2022 how it went!

We would like to say big thank you to Dan for sharing with us this blog post for DMPonline knowledge exchange series!

As always, we are keen to hear from you about how you use the tool, how RDM works at your institution and fits within your workflows and also how we can improve it, so please feel free to contact us at the details below: 

• DMPonline helpdesk at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk

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