On June 18th we gave a webinar on customizing the DMPTool for your institution. While the recording and slides from that presentation can be found on the webinar series page, here’s a brief review of the major topics that were covered.

What Do We Mean by Customization?

The DMPTool comes pre-populated with funder-provided information on how to construct a data management plan. Customizing the tool gives you a chance to modify what grant writers see when using the tool. Broken up into separate sections, administrators can provide help text, suggested answers, contacts at the institution, and resource links such as best practices guides or support groups.

The DMPTool’s audience includes students, researchers, and grant writers. Source: wikimedia commons

Customizing the DMPTool for your users can accomplish two goals. First, by setting up authentication and linking to resources and people from your institution, it encourages confidence in users. There are a lot of resources out there, so researchers will be looking for familiar signs. Second, you can ensure that your researchers are being connected to reliable, up-to-date information.

How to Customize

There are three steps to the customization process. Step one is to set up Shibboleth Authentication. Shibboleth is an open source software package used by many universities to provide a single login for multiple services. This can be extended to work with the DMPTool, to allow researchers to use the same login as other tools at their institution. Shibboleth is not required for customization, but without it researchers have to create their own account which can be a barrier to access. More information on how to set up shibboleth with DMPTool can be found at our website.

The second step is the customization documentation itself. This is where you provide information about your institution, and specific advice for each funder. These documents can be found at the Templates for Institutional Customization page on our bitbucket wiki. The institution settings document lets you select the email address where help requests should be sent as well as resource links that are relevant for each step in the process.

The 5 columns of the Funder Template, and the Information they need

We break up the other documents by funding agency to give you as much control as possible with your customization. Each document is broken up into different sections, and lets you provide resource links relevant to that question, a suggested answer, and help text.

Once these documents are filled out, you can attach them to an email and send them to uc3@ucop.edu for submission. We’ll populate the fields with the information you provide, and add your institution to the dropdown list at the DMPTool website.

For More Information…

We’ve started an Example Documentation page where institutions can share how they’ve used DMPTool customization. This is a great place to start if you want to see how others have customized the DMPTool.

For a more in-depth breakdown of how to customize the tool, as well how we’re working to provide more administrative control in future versions of the DMPTool, check out the full webinar. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email me at daniel.phipps@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.

We have determined the top-ranked institutions that use the DMPTool based on the number of users and of plans they create (October 2011 – Present).

Top 10 Institutions by Number of Users:

The following institutions have produced the most number of users on DMPTool.

Top 10 Institutions by Number of Plans:

The following institutions have produced the most data management plans using DMPTool.

Congratulations to the eight institutions that made both lists: North Carolina State University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC San Diego, University of Illinois, and University of Virginia.

Source: WikiMedia Commons

As a library, taking on an increased support role for data management is a long-term project that involves coordinating with groups institution-wide. Environmental scan interviews are a vital first step. They can help you find advocates in other departments, and find trouble on the horizon. We’ll be discussing how to perform an environmental scan in our webinar series this summer, but there are steps you can take within your library to begin the process. The first task at hand is to identify your own library’s existing services.

The library self-assessment is a critical first step to developing an environmental scan. Before speaking with the other technical or research support groups at your institution, you should have a written list of the services, initiatives, and plans that your library has undertaken.

What are you looking for?

The purpose of assembling this written list is to inform your later interviews and to help you focus on you institution’s priorities. In an ideal world, a thorough survey of library patrons and the services they need from the library would not only give you insight into how you focus your activities, but also give you ammunition when speaking to other departments about the importance of library data services. In the short term, speaking to your fellow librarians (especially reference, research, or subject specialists) about their interactions with researchers can give you a quick-and-dirty overview of where to focus your efforts. Looking at other university libguides on data services can also give you an idea of things researchers find useful.

Interviewing your Library’s Director

The other half of the internal review is the top-down approach. Taking what you’ve learned about the current state of affairs, meeting with your library director can give you broader, long term goals. Other, more detailed guides on how to conduct informative interviews exist, but broadly it’s useful to approach the interview with a pre-established set of goals for information you want to leave with, an understanding of how formal/detailed the interview will be, and a list of questions to ask. This should give you a wider-scale view of your Library’s data services work, and how it fits in with the campus’ larger scale priorities. You may also walk away with a better understanding of other groups on campus with a stake in data management for later use, as well as the internal organization of your own library.

Review, Recycle, Remix

While a self-assessment is the first step to developing an environmental scan of the whole institution, it also stands alone as a short-term thing librarians can do to start working on their own data practices. Before rushing off to coordinate with researchers, grant writing offices, or IT make sure you take the time to review the information you’re getting from your patrons, fellow librarians, and other staff. Giving yourself some weeks to digest this information will give you a better idea of what you can do in-house, what tasks require outside collaboration, and what might be out-of-scope for now.

For more on environmental scanning and other important aspects of data services at your library, keep an eye on our webinar page over the coming months.

The Office of Science and Technology Memorandum of February 22, 2013, entitled “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research” is a milestone in a path carved over at least the past decade and a half.  The DMPTool group traces this shift back to at least the late 1990s, with a minor change in the Office of Management and Budget policies, indicating a broader interest in openness and access to federally funded research.  Subsequent initiatives from the National Institutes for Health and National Science Foundation have been major steps in advancing this shift, but there is still a long way to go.

This statement is intended to offer specific points on how the DMPTool may be of service to the requirements of the memorandum.  We plan to initially distribute this statement as a post on the DMPTool blog, but will also contribute it towards the planning meetings scheduled for mid-May, organized by the National Research Council (NRC) Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education DBASSE).  Likewise, we may submit it to other relevant RFI calls, such as the “Reducing Investigator’s Administrative Workload for Federally Funded Research“.   We hope our efforts will be of benefit to as many constituents as possible throughout this initiative for increased access.

Background Information

The DMPTool was officially launched in October 2011, after months of collaborative development between the California Digital Library, University of Virginia Library, University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, University of California – Los Angeles, University of California – San Diego, UK Digital Curation Centre, DataONE, and the Smithsonian Institution.  While initially the tool focused meeting the needs of data management planning requirements from the National Science Foundation, it has since expanded to include requirements from the National Institutes of Health, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and several private funding organizations.  In 2012 and 2013, the group received funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, to expand functionality and support for the DMPTool into new areas and to meet new needs.  The DMPTool is presently used by over 4,500 users at over 650 institutions, and sees the greatest use from researchers applying to the NSF Biological Sciences (BIO) directorate, the National Institutes of Health, and the NSF Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate.  A community governance model is presently being implemented, and details can be found at  bitbucket.org/dmptool/main/wiki/Governance.

DMPTool Contributions

Based on the context outlined above, we propose the following three areas where the DMPTool may be of most service towards achieving the goals of “increasing access to the results of federally funded scientific research” and in particular the mandate to “ensure that all extramural researchers receiving Federal grants and contracts for scientific research and intramural researchers develop data management plans” (Page 5 of memorandum, item 4b):

1. Clear communication of the data management planning requirements: The DMPTool is presently the only known location providing an aggregate view of data management requirements and policies across funding agencies.  It also tracks changing requirements and realigns the updated requirements with associated guidance. This is a significant service to researchers who seek one place for answers.   Partnership between the DMPTool and agencies would enable further growth and establishment of the DMPTool as a coordinated hub, with relatively minimal effort or cost and improved researcher compliance.
2. Preparation of high-quality data management plans:  The success of this access initiative depends heavily on the quality of data management planning. Proper planning from the start requires having the right information at hand when making critical project decisions and plans; this will lead to better data discoverability and access.  This is challenging in research, as there are often many complex actors, including funding agencies, institutions, associations, national laboratories, repositories, and more.  The DMPTool community is well connected with many of these groups. For example, we have partnered with DataONE, ICPSR, and DataBib to connect our data management planning process with archival solutions.
3. Harmonization of requirements across agencies and communities:  With funding from two grants to improve the DMPTool, we are expanding the tool’s functionality, with particular attention to administrative user needs. These administrators may be at the institution level (e.g., at a university grants office), or at the funder level (e.g.,National Science Foundation).  As an example, new functionality will enable the Smithsonian Institution to use the DMPTool for preparation, approval, and tracking of all data management plans, across the entire institution, for all researchers.  It will allow institutional administrators to see plans being created by their researchers, and to better anticipate the types of resources and policies that will be needed to financially support research efforts.  Through this functionality and a broad view of data management planning requirements and practices, we believe that there is an opportunity here for improvement of overall requirements and practices to a point of harmonization.

We look forward to future discussions about how the DMPTool might help achieve the goals of broader access to federally funded scientific research.