Virtual DMPonline user group - November 2021

Few months have passed since our summer DMPonline user group and we were back with updates and possible DMPTool extensions which we might make live in DMPonline – based on your preferences. We have divided the day into two parts: at the start of the morning we updated you on the work we have done since our last user group on versioning specs, and in the second half of the session we presented you with possible features from DMPTool that might address previously raised issues and could be potentially plugged into DMPonline. In this short blog post we are summarising the day, with some points going ahead from there.   

Welcome to new organisations who joined DMPonline over the past year and the agenda 

We have started the day by welcoming our newest members of our DMPonline community (see image below) who joined us over the past year. Normally it is much easier to get to know one another and network when we meet in person, and we thought having an opportunity for our new joiners will give them more space to say hi and feel welcomed to our well-established community of DMPonline subscribers and partners.  

DMPonline – updates from our team  

Then we gave you an update on the latest development in DMPonline and DCC team. We are currently hiring for two new posts for software developers. We are planning to fill the senior role internally and in wider DCC team we have been joined by two new members – Laurence Horton and Irina Hope who will be taking over events management and you will have an opportunity to meet her in the following few months. We are also in the process of hiring a new training lead that will allow us to offer you more training around other aspects of research data management and open or FAIR data. We have also done two releases of DMPRoadmap – one in July v3.0.3 and in autumn v.3.0.4. We have picked up on bugs from Rails5 upgrade and infrastructure, started to work on some internal contractual work and defined versioning specifications. We currently have 62 clients (and actually much more because of national instance such as SUNET and DMPTuuli with more organisations under their umbrellas) and we continue with our monthly drop-ins that are now an hour long and back to planning our user groups regularly.  

Versioning specs – what we have worked on over the summer 

We continued with the update on the versioning – which was voted on our last user group as a priority number one feature to be worked on by our team. What we have done since was taking all the notes we gathered from the day from you and presenting them to our colleagues from DMPTool and our developers. DMPTool colleagues had some thoughts on versioning which they see mainly as versioning machine actionable DMPs and how these DMPs interact with external systems. For DMPonline we focused on your feedback where you said that these function as snapshots (so copy of DMP taken at certain point in time including comments and feedback). We presented you in detail through how this will work through the interface, where you will be able to access the versions, who will be able to create new versions and at which points these will be possible to be created. There will be a more detailed blog post that will follow on this topic and we will keep involving you for feedback once we start developing the feature.  

Possible DMPRoadmap features from CDL’s DMPTool 

After a short coffee break, we continued the day with presenting you with possible extensions developed by our colleagues from DMPTool. Similarly to us, they develop features which are not always plugged to the shared codebase immediately which gives us more opportunity to work sometimes on region specific or contractual work. Due to their funded project work, they focused most recently on developing a new tab on projects details page for research outputs and minting DOIs and integration with ORCID. We have provided you with demo for both. Overall, we felt that in regard to the research outputs the feedback has been quite positive and we will further collaborate with our CDL colleagues and put this into the shared code base. We will let you know once any new feature will be available for you on our testing service. 

Minting DOIs and integration with ORCID was welcomed with more reservations, even though ORCID integration was raised as a priorities for new feature in DMPonline at the last user group. Currently we are not sure where the landing page would be hosted and what should be displayed. This is currently not a feature that many of you would need, some thought it could be useful but there are still quite few unanswered questions which we would need to explore internally and with our colleagues from CDL.  

What we learned  

We got some very good feedback on the versioning which we will further work on with our colleagues from CDL such as possibly renaming how to access versioning (rename access version>version history), ensure that a new copy keeps URL and IDs consistent and ensure that admins have access to the versions through the interface. In terms of the extensions from DMPTool, the research outputs seems to be welcomed whereas although DOI minting currently does not seem desirable and ORCID integration could be explored in other parts of the system to be more useful. We have really enjoyed catching up with you, chatting to you, presenting you with our most recent update on your requested features from the last user group. We are planning next user group for 27th April 2022 at 9:30 (UK time) so if you do not want to miss is and wish to join us please get in touch with us at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk so we can add you to the list of attendees.   

Last but not least...  

If you have any further thoughts and ideas or you wish to take part in the upcoming user groups, please contact us at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk and feel free to contact us at the details below:  

• DMPonline helpdesk at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk  

• Social media: Twitter @DMPonline  and LinkedIn

• Do not forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter. To keep up with DMPonline news, you can subscribe to the RSS feed to receive our blogs and tweets, and watch GitHub for code updates. You can also discuss any of our new features on the user group mailing list