Following two years of collaboration and development of the DMPTool, it now seems the appropriate time to address the lingering questions of “who’s in charge of this thing?” and “what does it mean to be a Partner?”.  The DMPTool team is pleased to now introduce a formal collaboration agreement and set of operating principles to guide the continued efforts, enable broader community engagement, and facilitate collaboration with the data management community.  This seemed like a smart and necessary move as the service has seen users from over 650 institutions and continues to gain interest and diversity in application.  Additionally, this structure will dovetail nicely with the advisory organizations and community-building activities made possible through our current Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and IMLS grants.

Here are the highlights:

• A DMPTool Steering Group will coordinate all technical, content, and community development activities.  This group will be comprised of DMPTool Partners who have made significant contributions to the DMPTool community and are eager to help guide it’s future.
• DMPTool Partners will now be defined as institutions, corporations, individuals, or other groups who have signed the collaboration agreement, made the commitment to use the DMPTool technical and content framework via an authenticated connection, and contribute to the community in some other way as well.  We will be working to enroll institutions currently using the DMPTool over the course of the next month.
• In the interest of building a stronger and more cohesive community, we will now accept new Partners via the following process:
  1. Express interest to the DMPTool Steering Group by writing uc3@ucop.edu.
  2. Sign the Collaboration Agreement and Memorandum of Understanding.
  3. Establish institutional authentication with the DMPTool.

While the Collaboration Agreement and Memorandum of Understanding is NOT a contract, it does serve as a set of common operating principles for the growth and operation of this service and community effort.  Until DMPTool2 is released, we will house the governance process information on the DMPTool BitBucket wiki pages here:  https://bitbucket.org/dmptool/main/wiki/Governance 

We hope that this new structure provides the community with a clear path for decision-making, opportunities for integration with other software and systems, and quite simply, a better-defined entity to affiliate with in order to build community.

The DMPTool team looks forward to your involvement!

-Andrew Sallans & Patricia Cruse, Co-Conveners of the DMPTool Steering Group