Category Archives: Roadmap Project

DMPRoadmap Annual Planning Meeting

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This is a joint blog post between DMPonline and the DMPTool

In February we conducted our annual strategic planning meeting between DCC and CDL to discuss joint plans for the upcoming year. We were joined from DCC by: Kevin Ashley, Patricia Herterich, Magdalena Drafiova, Marta Nicholson, Ray Carrick, Angus Whyte, Diana Sisu and from CDL: John Chodacki, Marisa Strong, Catherine Nancarrow, Brian Riley and Maria Praetzellis.

This meeting was a follow up to our 2019  meeting, where we had a chance to meet for three days with our colleagues and we wanted to replicate this in our half day online meeting. This time around we had to swap to Zoom for the lovely city of Edinburgh and only met for a half day instead of three days. Nonetheless, we managed to accomplish some important high level planning discussions regarding the work of continuing our collaboration on the Roadmap codebase. In this blog post we provide you with the summary of what we discussed and share our plans for the coming months. 

Celebrating the achievements of 2020

We all agreed that despite the many challenges of 2020 (not to mention the departure of Sarah Jones and Sam Rust), this was a very successful year for our collaboration. Our team of developers completed several large developments a few of which are highlighted below: 

  • Completed the Rails5 migration 
  • Developed an API that is compliant with the RDA Common Standard for DMPs
  • Released a new feature allowing for conditional questions and notifications within DMP templates
  • Improved the usage dashboard
  • Integrated with Google Analytics
  • Integrated with translation.io to facilitate several languages

Several new features surrounding machine-actionable DMPs were also released of the past year including: 

  • RORs Identifiers for research organizations
  • Funder Registry Identifiers for funders
  • ORCiDs for DMP creators and collaborators
  • API compliant with RDA Common Standard Metadata Schema 
  • Ability to export plans as RDA Common Standard compliant JSON

Highlights of our 2021 Development Plans 

During the first quarter of 2021, DMPonline will focus on consolidating the code base, making sure the various changes both the DMPTool and DMPonline team have developed over the past year are integrated and any new work is carried out on top of a shared code base. 

UX Improvements 

Based on the extensive usability testing that both DMPTool and DMPonline have conducted over the past year, we will select pieces of work that will have significant impact for both services. Initially we will focus on the creation of a new plan wizard making the creation of new plans and the selection of templates and appropriate guidance easier.

Expanded machine-actionable DMP features

  • The ability to generate a unique identifier for a DMP with an associated landing page that connects the DPM to eventual research outputs
  • A new Research Outputs tab will allow for more granular description of specific research outputs 
  • Integration with the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data)
  • Integration with FAIRsharing
  • Plan versioning

DMPRoadmap for funders

In 2021, we will also work on making DMPRoadmap more useful to funders. This will include:

  • A different dashboard view
  • Easier ways to integrate grant numbers and other funder specific information
  • Tagging of institutional DMP templates as funder compliant

Other collaborations

The DMPonline team will also work with the TU Delft on a project that will integrate the system more with institutional login options to automatically get more information about users and use that to improve workflows and reporting for institutional admins.

RSpace integration

The electronic lab notebook, RSpace, and the DMPTool are currently working on an integration allowing for the bi-directional linking of data between DMPTool and RSpace. The first phase of this work is currently in development and utilizes OAuth so that users can connect accounts. Once we get this initial connection running, the team will look at bi-directional notifications and updates between the two systems.

For a more detailed description of our upcoming development plans please see our wiki page. This promises to be another busy but exciting year of work for both teams and we look forward to continuing to share our progress with you!

DMPRoadmap Team at the maDMP Hackathon

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Research Data Alliance (RDA) recently hosted a three day (27-29 May 2020) machine-actionable DMP hackathon to build integrations and test the Common Standard for maDMPs. The event, coordinated through teams at RDA-Austria and TU Wien, was well attended with over 70 participants from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America. 

The teams that work on DMP Tool (dmptool.org) and DMP Online (dmponline.org) were really pleased to represent our shared DMPRoadmap codebase and show our conformance with the standard and ability to exchange DMPs across systems. This blog post details the work of the DMPRoadmap group in the hackathon, for a full review of all outputs please visit the Hackathon GitHub.

What did we work on?

Maria Praetzellis and Sarah Jones, product managers from DMPRoadmap, joined the hackathon “TigTag” team and focused on mapping maDMPs to funder templates. During the hackathon, their group successfully mapped required questions from several funder specific DMPs including: 

  • Horizon 2020
  • Science Europe
  • National Science Foundation
  • U.S. Geological Survey

The goal of the exercise was to develop guidance on how to normalize the ways that fields from specific funder templates can be mapped to the standard, and, when necessary, develop extensions to incorporate template specific needs. The team came up with several proposals for changes to the documentation and structure of DMP Common Standard and made a few recommendations for extensions to the standard. The team is now assembling the recommendations and will submit ideas as issues to the Common Standard GitHub so work can be tracked going forward. 

Brian Riley and Sam Rust, developers from DMPRoadmap,  joined the hackathon “DMP Exchange team” and worked to determine how the RDA Common Standard JSON format could be used to exchange DMP metadata between tools. Their team provided a staging service and granted API keys to other development teams to allow testing of prototypes, which helped all participants debug issues. Over the course of the hackathon, our new maDMP API helped developers of the following DMP systems implement their own APIs:

Based on this work, we were able to exchange maDMP metadata between DMPTool and those three systems by the end of the hackathon.  Below are screenshots of DMP exports from the Data Stewardship Wizard that were imported into the DMPTool. Because we were each using the RDA Common Standard format, the new DMP was created within the DMPTool and the appropriate metadata was successfully mapped: title, description, project start/end dates, grant ID, contact information, and contributor information.

While the data models used by many systems do not yet offer full support of the RDA Common Standard model, progress was made towards mapping the high level DMP information across the board. Also, the confirmation that these systems could exchange information using RDA Common Standard JSON was encouraging and will likely open the door for future integrations. 

Other outcomes

We also collaborated with members of the DMP Melbourne, University of Cape Town and Stockholm University on an integration with their institutional repository platform. The teams were interested in pushing both DMP metadata and the physical DMP document into that repository. However, they did not yet support the maDMP standard. So the team created two separate prototype scripts. The first script extracts DMPs from a DMPRoadmap system and creates a placeholder Project that future datasets can be connected to and also uploads a PDF copy of the DMP. The second script converts their JSON into RDA Common Standard compliant JSON. While their institutional repositories do not contain many DMPs at this point, a service like this could help extract DMPs for import into DMP systems that utilize the RDA Common Standards in the future. We hope to build upon this work to facilitate integrations with additional repositories in the future. 

Future work 

Hackathon participants are now collating work produced during the hackathon into a final report. In addition, participants expressed interest in:

  • More communities. Most of the attendees at this hackathon were developers from DMP-focused tools. In the future, it would be great to have participants from other communities, including developers of CRIS systems, data repository platforms, and ethics tools.  This would help us expand the types of use cases being served.
  • More PIDs. The power of connected information replies on persistent identifiers.  We would like to increase our connection with various standards and integrate with the Research Organization Registry (ROR), the Funder Registry, and the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to provide more structured information to support such integrations.

Thank you again to the team at RDA Austria and TU Wein for organizing the hackathon.  If you’re interested in tracking future development and outputs of this work please follow the GitHub and consider joining the RDA Common Standard Working Group or Active DMPs Interest Group. 

DMP services unite!

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This November the DMPRoadmap team conducted a series of strategic planning meetings. Meeting in-person was highly productive and a great way to energize the team for the ambitious work we have planned for the upcoming year. Read more about the meeting and our development goals below. This blog post was originally published by Magdalena Drafiova from DMP online on 3 December, 2019.

From left to right: Brian Riley, Benjamin Faure, Marta Nicholson, Maria Praetzellis, Sarah Jones, Sam Rust and Ray Carrick.

In the middle of November we were joined for three days by our colleagues Maria Praetzellis and Brian Riley from DMPTool and Benjamin Faure from OPIDoR. On our end Sarah Jones, Sam Rust, Ray Carrick, Marta Nicholson, Diana Sisu and Magdalena Drafiova represented DMPonline. We’ve had a number of new people join the team over the past year so the meetings were a great opportunity to get to know one another and discuss where to take things next.

Over the three days we had a mix of group discussions to plan the future development roadmap (results of that later), as well as developer / project manager sessions and discussions with the wider DCC and CDL team on machine-actionable DMPs. Below we report out on the results of our sessions and the future development roadmap

Developer team meeting

The tech team had a separate team meeting to give more time to discuss changes to the codebase and development procedures.They walked through the data model and key functionality to bring new devs up to speed and discussed major pieces of infrastructure work to schedule over the coming year (e.g. upgrading to Rails v.5, making a more robust test infrastructure, etc.). They also reviewed the current development project management processes and will be revising our PR review workflow and incorporating a continuous integration approach. This will allow developers to work more atomically. A single bug fix or feature enhancement will now be handled individually instead of as a component of a larger single release. Each issue will be merged into the codebase as a single point release allowing the team to work more efficiently as well as making it easier to accept contributions from external developers.

Project management meeting
Magdalena, Maria, Sarah and Diana discussed procedures for prioritizing tickets, managing the team and conducting User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Sarah and Diana will share expertise on weekly PM meetings to bring Magdalena and Maria up to speed. We have also decided to change our sprint schedule as we will be joined by more developers. We want to do our releases more often and have less tickets on the board so we can review them all in each call. This coupled with the continuous integration approach should get fixes and features out more quickly. We have assigned a developer to each area which we want to work on, although we want to ensure that the knowledge is shared and everyone has an opportunity to work across the codebase so we don’t create dependencies.

We also discussed the need to conduct user testing, especially on the administrative area of the tool. This will involve setting some tasks and observing users complete them to see what issues they encounter and where the tool is not intuitive. We hope to run these tests in Summer 2020. If you would be interested in getting people from your organization involved, please let us know.

Development roadmap
We agreed on the development roadmap by dividing our key areas of work into time phases. Some activities are ongoing system improvements and will happen throughout the time periods.The first part of work which we hope that will run till February 2020 is around the feedback we have received in our user groups. This work will finalize the conditional questions functionality, improve search for administrators and make the usage dashboard more insightful so you can get better analytics about how is the tool used at your institution. We will also integrate a new feature from DMP OPIDoR to enable one click plan creation. From the public templates page, users will be able to click on an icon and create a plan based on that template. We are also planning integrations so you can export DMPs to Zenodo and RIO Journal and complete our work on regional filtering to separate funders/templates/organization by country.

The second part of the work will focus on making our default template machine-actionable by adding integrations to controlled vocabularies, a re3data repository selector, license selector, fewer free text fields, as well as important identifiers for users (ORCID ids) and organizations (ROR ids). We will also update our API so that it conforms to the RDA Common standard.

We will finish the year by adding new features that allow administrators to pre-define a subset of good institutionally shared plans. We will also improve the current plan version and a lifecycle of plan version so you can indicate the status of the plan. We will also work on incorporating multiple datasets into DMPs so you can get better insights about various storage requirements, license requirements etc. Enabling static pages to be edited is also on the to-do list. Lots to look forward to!

Roadmap back to school edition

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Summer activities and latest (major 2.0.0) release
The DMPRoadmap team is checking in with an overdue update after rotating holidays and work travels over the past few months. We also experienced some core team staff transitions and began juggling some parallel projects. As a result we haven’t been following a regular development schedule, but we have been busy tidying up the codebase and documentation.

This post summarizes the contents of the major release and provides instructions for those with existing installations who will need to make some configuration changes in order to upgrade to the latest and greatest DMPRoadmap code. In addition to infrastructure improvements, we fixed some bugs and completed some feature enhancements. We appreciate the feedback and encourage you to keep it coming since this helps us set priorities (listed on the development roadmap) and meet the data management planning needs of our increasingly international user community. On that note, we welcome Japan (National Institute for Informatics) and South Africa (NeDICC) as additional voices in the DMP conversation!

Read on for more details about all the great things packed into the latest release, as well as some general updates about our services and of course machine-actionable DMPs. The DCC has already pushed the release out to its services and the DMPTool will be upgrading soon – separate communications to follow. Those who run their own instances should check out the full release notes and a video tutorial on the validations and data clean-up (thanks Gavin!) to complete the upgrade.

DMPRoadmap housekeeping work (full release notes, highlights below)

  • Instructions for existing installations to upgrade to the latest release. Please read and follow these carefully to prevent any issues arising from invalid data. We highly recommend that you backup your existing database before running through these steps to prepare your system for Roadmap 2.0.0!
  • Added a full suite of automated unit tests to make it easier to incorporate external contributions and improve overall reliability.
  • Added data validations for improved data integrity.
  • Created new and revised existing documentation for coding conventions, tests, translations, etc (Github wiki). We can now update existing translations and add new ones more efficiently.

DMPRoadmap new features and bug fixes

  • Comments are now visible by default without having to click ‘Show.’ Stay tuned for additional improvements to the plan comments functionality in upcoming sprints.
  • Renamed/standardized text labels for ‘Save’ buttons for clarity.
  • Added a button to download a list of org users as a csv file (Admin > ‘Users’ page)
  • Added a global usage report for total users and plans for all orgs (Admin > ‘Usage’ page)
  • Admins can create customized template sections and place them at the beginning or end of funder templates via drag-and-drop
  • Removed multi-select box as an answer format and replaced with multiple choice

DCC/DMPonline subscriptions [Please note: this does not apply to DMPTool users] Another recent change is in the DMPonline service delivery model. The DCC has been running DMP services for overseas clients for several years and is now transitioning the core DMPonline tool to a subscription model based on administrator access to the tool. The core functionality (developing, sharing and publishing DMPs) remains freely accessible to all, as well as the templates, guidance and user manuals we offer. We also remain committed to the Open Source DMPRoadmap codebase. The charges cover the support infrastructure necessary to run a production-level international service. More information is available for our users in a recent announcement. We’re also growing the support team to keep up with the requests we’re receiving. If you are interested in being at the cutting edge of DMP services and engaging with the international community to define future directions, please apply to join us!

Machine-actionable DMPs
Increasing the opportunities for machine-actionability of DMPs was one of the spurs behind the DMPRoadmap collaboration. Facilities already exist via use of a number of standard identifiers and we’re moving on both the standards development tracks and code development and testing.

The CDL has been prototyping for the NSF EAGER grant and started a blog series focused on this work (#1, #2, next installation forthcoming), with an eye to seeding conversations and sharing experiences as many of us begin to experiment in multiple directions. CDL prototyping efforts are separate from the DMPRoadmap project currently but will inform future enhancements.

We’re also attempting to inventory global activities and projects on https://activedmps.org/ Some updates for this page are in the works to highlight new requirements and tools. Please add any other updates you’re aware of! Sarah ran a workshop in South Africa in August on behalf of NeDICC to gather requirements for machine-actionable DMPs there and the DCC will be hosting a visit from DIRISA in December. All the content from the workshop is on Zenodo and you can see how engaged the audience got in mapping our solutions. The DCC is also presenting on recent trends in DMPs as part of the OpenAIRE and FOSTER webinar series for Open Access week 2018. The talk maps out the current and emerging tools from a European perspective. Check out the slides and video.

You can also check out the preprint and/or stop by the poster for ‘Ten Principles for Machine-Actionable DMPs’ at Force2018 in Montreal and the RDA plenary in Botswana. This work presents 10 community-generated principles to put machine-actionable DMPs into practice and realize their benefits. The principles describe specific actions that various stakeholders are already undertaking or should take.

We encourage everyone to contribute to the session for the DMP Common Standards working group at the next RDA plenary (Nov 5-8 in Botswana). There is community consensus that interoperability and delivery of DMP information across systems requires a common data model; this group aims to deliver a framework for this essential first step in actualizing machine-actionable DMPs.

Release notes: Translations and more

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We’re back to a two-week sprint rhythm and have some exciting new things in the latest release:

  • Translations: Our collaborators at the Portage Network in Canada helped internationalize the new version of the platform and various others contributed translations of DMPonline prior to the launch. We’ve added many new features to the DMP Roadmap codebase since then. It also took some wrangling to establish a process for handling and updating translation files. We’re happy to report that the DMPTool now offers a Brazilian Portuguese translation, with additional languages in the works (Spanish, Catalán, French, German, Japanese…). Users can adjust language selections for a given session in the dropdown menu at the upper right. You can also save a default language selection for your account under Edit profile. Please note that all DMPTool templates for US funders are available in English only at the moment.

language selector dropdown

  • Request feedback emails: We made some adjustments to these based on feedback from admins. Now a participating organization must provide a primary contact email on the Organization details page in order to enable the Request feedback functionality. When a user submits a plan for feedback, the system will deliver an email notification to this primary contact email (not to everyone with admin privileges at that org as it did previously). We plan to continue refining this functionality during future sprints so please let us know what does and doesn’t work for you.
  • Guidance: Admins will notice a slight change here; you are now required to apply exactly one theme to each piece of guidance (using the radio buttons). For organizations that have guidance tagged with multiple themes, the guidance will still work and show for the existing themes. However, when you edit or update the guidance you will only see one of the themes selected and will only be able to select one from this point forward.

guidance page with theme radio buttons

  • Bug fixes and usability improvements: We’re ironing out some kinks with table sorting and searching during this latest sprint and continuing into the next one. Read the full release notes for a complete list of bug fixes and many thanks to our international user community for reporting most of these issues!

In other news

Please join me for a deep dive webinar into Themes, Templates, and Guidance on 18 July, 9-10 am PDT. Register here. The recording will be available afterward.

DMPTool promo materials are in the mail! If you want some new, blue postcards and stickers and didn’t already place your order, follow this link. And thanks to all those who provided suggestions in the order form about how we can help you help researchers create DMPs. We’ll do our best to follow up on them!

dmptool postcard

Release notes: Templates and more

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The Roadmap development team just finished a huge chunk of work that we rolled out to DMPTool users this week. Prior to launching the new version of the tool we focused on optimizing the primary user side: creating DMPs. With this new release, we’ve made significant improvements to the administrative side, specifically to overhaul the way admins create and version templates.

In the midst of this major refactoring effort, we did some additional maintenance, upgrades, and accepted the first new feature contribution from our French partners at DMP OPIDoR (many thanks to Benjamin and Quentin!). The full release notes are available on GitHub. Most of the magic takes place behind the scenes, but keep reading for a summary of changes that affect the user interface.

  • Templates: You’ll notice some subtle changes as you create, edit, and update templates and customizations for funder templates. Previously, any changes you made to a template would trigger a new version. Now you can make changes to template details (Title, Description, update broken links) without versioning. Any structural changes, such as adding a new question or example answer or adding customized guidance to a funder template will create a new version. In the main templates table you will see a red editing icon (screenshot below) if you’ve made changes that created a new version. The icon includes a tooltip that alerts you to publish your changes (in the Actions menu) in order to make them available to users. You can always “Unpublish” templates and customizations at any time. You will only see the option to “Remove” (i.e. from the table/from view)  a template that has not been used to create any plans (e.g. test templates) or a customization that has not been previously published. Detailed instructions are available in the Help for Administrators.

publish changes

  • Global notifications: Super Admins (me) now have the ability to create global notifications that will be displayed to all users. These appear at the top of the screen and alert users to important news items such as scheduled maintenance or updates to funder templates. Users can dismiss the notifications by clicking the ‘x’ on the right (if I configure them to be dismissable; there may be cases where you cannot dismiss the notification but I don’t anticipate using this frequently).

global notifications

We appreciate the feedback we’ve received so far and encourage everyone to keep it coming. Specifically, let us know what additional improvements we can make to the templates and guidance areas as you test the newly released code. A note: many have reported issues with searching and sorting tables, which we’re addressing as part of the next sprint. Please report any new feedback via Github Issues or the helpdesk.

Upcoming events

  • With this latest release, the timing is finally right for a templates and guidance webinar. We’re aiming for a date in early July (TBD very soon). The recording will be available afterward.
  • For those who ordered outreach materials, you will receive them in the next 2-3 weeks. Thanks for your patience!

 

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

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Our DMPTool and DMPonline services have been humming along with the same underlying code for a couple of months now. Since our MVP release, we’ve shifted gears to more regular sprints. We’re also pleasantly surprised by how eager the wider DMP community has been to join forces in migrating, translating, and even contributing new features already! Here’s a brief retrospective and a glimpse into the future.

Post MVP Backlog
There is a modest backlog of work that didn’t make into the MVP release. We’ve prioritized these issues and are focused on tying up the loose ends over the coming months. Those following the DMPRoadmap Github repository will notice regular releases. The goal is to settle into a steady two-week rhythm, but in the near term we’re working on slightly shorter or longer cycles to address critical bugs and some minor refactoring. Many thanks to our users on both sides of the pond who have reported issues and provided overwhelmingly positive feedback so far!

Evolving processes
We’ve been communicating with our respective user communities about new fixes and features as things pertain to them. Some things to note about our evolving development process:

  • DMPRoadmap GitHub repo: this is where most development work happens since the majority of fixes and features apply to the core codebase. This repository also contains all technical documentation, release notes, and other info for those interested in deploying their own instances or contributing to the project.
  • The DMPRoadmap wiki has a list of potential future enhancements. We’re collating ideas here and will define priorities and requirements in consultation with the community via user groups and listserv discussions. If you have other desired new features please let us know.
  • Any service-specific customizations reside in separate GitHub repos. For example, you can find the custom Single-Sign-On code in the DMPTool GitHub repo. The way that we handle helpdesk functions varies too. DMPTool users can report issues directly in the DMPTool repo or via the helpdesk. If something pertains to the common codebase, Stephanie will tag the issue and transfer it to DMPRoadmap. For DMPonline users we ask you to report issues via the helpdesk.

External contributions
Our core dev team is test driving the external contributor guidelines with the French team from DMP OPIDoR. They developed a new feature for a global notification system (e.g., to display maintenance messages, updates to funder templates) that happens to be in our backlog. The new feature looks great and is exactly the kind of contribution we’d like from others. You’ll see it in the next release. Thanks Benjamin and Quentin!

We’re also keen to commence monthly community dev calls to learn about other new features that folks might be planning and keep track of how we collaborate on DMP support across the globe.

Translations
We’ll be adding new translations for Brazilian Portuguese (thanks to Benilton de Sá Carvalho and colleagues at UNICAMP) and Finnish thanks to DMPTuuli. We’re also reaching out to fill in missing portions of existing translations for other languages since we added so many new features. New translations are always welcome; more information is available on the GitHub wiki and/or contact us.

A machine-actionable future
With the launch milestone behind us, we’re devoting more attention and resources to creating a machine-actionable future for DMPs. Two working groups hosted productive sessions at the recent RDA plenary (DMP Common Standards, Exposing DMPs) that included lightning talk presentations by members of the DMPRoadmap project (slides 1 and slides 2). Both of the groups are on track to provide actionable outputs in the next 12 months that will bolster wider community efforts on this front. We’ll continue participating in both groups as well as begin prototyping things with the NSF EAGER grant awarded to the California Digital Library. Stay tuned for more details via future updates and check out the activedmps.org site to get involved.

We have lift off – DMPRoadmap launches!

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fireworks

From Flickr by bbtburnham http://bit.ly/2FmYLIE

by Sarah Jones

We’re delighted to announce that the DMPTool and DMPonline sites are both now running from the new joint DMPRoadmap codebase. We pushed the MVP out to test last month and have now migrated our production services. There are lots of exciting new features (v1.0 release notes).

The site will undergo a second round of accessibility testing soon and we’ve done a number of performance and usability improvements as part of bringing together our two codebases. We have also implemented the revised set of DMP themes agreed with community input last year. For UK users this means legacy guidance for removed themes has been merged and will need editing. See more information in this news item.

We gave a demo of the new system at the IDCC conference in Barcelona last month, and also gave a paper on a landscape analysis of “Active DMPs,” charting all the work that is going on in this area internationally. This information is available on a new website http://activedmps.org to serve as a central hub of machine-actionable DMP work. We invite everyone to update the site with links to any requirements you collect, or details of new tools emerging in this area. And don’t forget to join the sessions at the next RDA plenary where the DMP Common Standards WG will be comparing data models for the different DMP tools and the Exposing DMPs WG will be defining which elements of DMPs need to be shared to which actors. We also have a paper forthcoming that touches on work in these areas: the pre-print of 10 Simple Rules for Machine-Actionable DMPs is out now in Zenodo.

There is a huge number of users of the DMPRoadmap codebase. In addition to the core DMPonline and DMPTool services, there are many other instances internationally, some hosted by the DCC, but the majority are run by external groups. We estimate 50k+ users, 400+ participating institutions internationally and a growing list of funder contacts across the globe. We encourage those hosting their own instances to migrate from the former DMPonline v4 code to DMPRoadmap, and to continue to contribute back to the joint development effort like the Portage consortium in Canada and DMP OPIDoR in France have done. Migration guidelines are available to help dev teams make the switch and we have a Slack channel for external contributors. If you aren’t already a member, join here.

As always we welcome your feedback and look forward to continuing to improve the DMP experience for everyone involved in the research enterprise.

Prepare for launch in 3… 2… 1…

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In about two weeks we will launch the new DMPTool on Tues, 27 Feb. The much-anticipated third version of the tool represents an exciting next step in what has always been a community-driven project. We’ve now successfully merged the primary US- and UK-based data management planning tools into a single codebase (DMP Roadmap): the engine under the new DMPTool hood.

Why are we doing this?

A little background for those who haven’t been following along with our codevelopment journey: in 2016 the University of California Curation Center (UC3) decided to join forces with the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) to maintain a single open-source platform for DMPs. We took this action to extend our reach beyond national boundaries and move best practices forward, with a lofty goal to begin making DMPs machine actionable (i.e., useful for managing data). We’ll continue to run our own branded services (DMPTool, DMPonline, DMPTuuli, DMPMelbourne) on the shared codebase, and incorporate partners in Canada, Argentina, South Africa, and throughout Europe who are already running their own instances (full list).

In parallel with our co-development efforts we’ve been making the rounds of Research Data Alliance, Force11, IDCC, and disciplinary meetings to collect use cases for machine-actionable DMPs (details here) and help define common standards (RDA Working Group; just posted pre-print for 10 Simple Rules for Machine-Actionable DMPs). We also got an NSF EAGER grant so we can begin prototyping muy pronto.

The new version of the DMPTool will enable us to implement and test machine-actionable things in a truly global open science ecosystem. Successful approaches to making DMPs a more useful exercise will require input from and adoption by many stakeholders so we look forward to working with our existing DMP Roadmap community (an estimated 50k+ users, 400+ participating institutions, and a growing list of funder contacts across the globe) and welcoming others into the fold!

Preparing for Launch

To help DMPTool administrators prepare themselves and their institutional users for the upcoming launch, we will host a webinar on:

Mon, 26 Feb 2018, 9-10 AM Pacific Time
Zoom link (recording on Vimeo; Q&A and slides)

By that time we’ll have a new user guide for administrators, a new Quick Start Guide for researchers, and refreshed promo materials. Everyone will have seamless access to their existing DMPTool accounts, just through a new user interface that looks and feels more like DMPonline (spoiler alert: we made it blue). And one of the most exciting things about the new tool is that it contains 34 freshly updated funder templates with links to additional funder guidance.

Stay tuned to the DMPTool communication channels in the coming weeks (blog, admin email list, Twitter) for more news and updates. We look forward to seeing you at the webinar and welcome your feedback at any point.

First annual funder template pizza party!

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template editors

As we approach our target release date of Feb 2018 for the DMP Roadmap platform, the DMPTool team has embarked on a major housekeeping effort. A top-to-bottom content review is underway, and last week we began an audit of the funder templates and guidance. Ten participants gathered for an all-day, pizza-fueled event that amounted to a huge template success (but an epic pizza fail, see evidence below). We were so productive and gratified by the opportunity to analyze multiple DMP policies in a group setting that we decided to make it an annual event. Read on for more DMPTool funder template news + migration plans, followed by brief updates on the DMP Roadmap project and machine-actionable DMPs.

DMPTool funder templates

The DMPTool is a hugely popular community resource in part because it serves as a central clearinghouse of information about DMP requirements and guidance for researchers applying for grants from U.S. funding agencies. Migrating the DMPTool data to the new platform provides an opportunity to update and normalize things to maintain this value. [Side note: we’re also adding a “Last updated” field to the DMP Requirements table as an enhancement in the new platform per your feedback.]

At present the tool contains 32 templates for 16 different federal and private funders. This top 10 templates list demonstrates that our users are especially keen on getting support with NSF and NIH grant proposals, although the NEH is #7, and DOE and others aren’t far behind. Some global usage statistics to put these numbers in context: 26.8k users have created 20k plans; and we have 216 participating institutions (mostly U.S. colleges and universities).

funder-template-table

Our goals for the pizza party included: 1) ensuring that template language comes directly from the most recent versions of funder policy documents; and 2) applying themes (more on themes here). Staying up to date with DMP requirements remains a crowdsourced effort spearheaded by data librarians using the Twitter hashtag #OSTPResp and a Google spreadsheet. In the past year, two additional resources entered the scene: a list of public access plans from U.S. federal agencies at CENDI.gov and this lovely SPARC tool. Using these reference materials and some additional internet research, we updated 7 links to policy documents in the current DMPTool platform (NIH-GDS, NEH-ODH, NSF-CHE, NOAA, USDA-NIFA, Joint Fire Science Program, Sloan) and made some revisions to templates in the new platform (mostly formatting). We also identified some templates that require deeper investigation and/or consultation with agency contacts to verify the best way to present DMP requirements; between now and the release date we’ll continue to work on these templates. In addition, Jackie Wilson is contracting with us to finalize the clean-up of templates and guidance (checking links and guidance text provided by funders).

#pizzafail

#pizzafail

By January we aim to have a beta DMPTool-branded version of the new platform ready for training and testing purposes. Stay tuned for a rollout plan in the new year that includes webinars for institutional administrators, with an orientation to templates and themes. Also, please note that we will be disabling template editing functionality on 18 Dec in the current version of DMPTool to maintain the integrity of template data in the new platform. For admin users who wish to make changes to templates and guidance after that date, you can contact the helpdesk, but it would be great if you can keep changes to a minimum. All other functionality in the current DMPTool will remain the same up to the final migration date (adding new users, institutions, creating and editing plans, etc.)

A million thanks to the 2017 template fixing team: Amy Neeser, Joan Starr, Alana Miller, Jackie Wilson, Marisa Strong, Daniella Lowenberg, Perry Willett, John Chodacki, and Stephen Abrams.

DMP Roadmap update

The co-development team is busy building and refining the final MVP features. The usage dashboard is the last new feature left to add. In the meantime, parallel data migration efforts are underway at DCC to move from the existing 28 DMPonline themes to the new set of 14. By January both service teams will be working on new user guides, updating other content, testing and branding. If all continues to go smoothly, we’ll be on track for a DMP Roadmap demo at IDCC in Barcelona (19–22 Feb) and an official code release. Stay tuned!

Machine-actionable DMPs

On the machine-actionable DMP front, there are two items to report:

  1. We’ll be emailing the various DMP lists shortly to encourage everyone to participate in working meetings for the RDA WGs (DMP Common Standards & Exposing DMPs) at the next plenary. For now mark your calendars for 21–23 Mar and join us in Berlin!
  2. Following on a productive session at FORCE2017, we’re finishing a draft of the 10 Simple Rules for Machine-Actionable DMPs that we will circulate soon soon.

As always, we encourage you to contact us to get involved!