Templates and guidance 101

We’ve been running the new DMPTool for about a month now and are gratified by the positive reception from all corners of the globe. Now that we’re settling into a regular development rhythm and tying up some loose ends, I want to circle back to the topic of templates and guidance for organizational administrators.

DMPTool data migration adverse effects

As I mentioned in a recent message to the admin listserv, you may notice some misplaced organizational guidance as a result of migrating data from the old version to the new data model. Some pieces of guidance (e.g. text, links, example answers) that were created by an organizational admin and attached to specific templates (e.g. NIH Genomic Data Sharing) became divorced from the template and now appear in the list of generic themed guidance. This resulted in some cases where users now see e.g., information about NIH genomic data repositories as part of their local/organizational guidance regardless of the template they selected.

We’ve evaluated the extent of the problem, which can’t be solved programmatically (alas!)—there are about 30 published (active) organizational templates owned by various universities and about 40 universities who created pieces of guidance for specific funder templates that may no longer be attached to the appropriate template. We’re asking for your assistance to implement the following solution:

1. Please take a look at your organizational Guidance in the Admin menu (screenshot above) and identify anything that seems out of place.
2. If you can determine which template a particular piece of guidance should be attached to, you should transfer it to the appropriate question(s) for the appropriate template in the Templates menu by creating a “customization” (instructions in the Help for administrators > Customizing funder templates).
3. After you create the customization, go back to the Guidance area and remove that piece of guidance. Alternatively, you can just unpublish the pieces of guidance that should not appear as generic guidance on all templates (instructions for Creating guidance).
4. If you can’t easily determine where any misplaced guidance should go, contact us and we can assist you. Please just be patient with turn around times as *we* are a team of two with many other duties to juggle.

Create themed guidance

This is also a great time to familiarize yourself with the new concept of themes and apply them to your organizational guidance. Themes represent the most common topics addressed in data management plans and work like tags to associate questions and guidance. Questions within templates can be tagged with one or more themes, and guidance can be written by theme to allow organizations to apply their advice over multiple templates at once.

Here is a partial inventory of funder template themes (full inventory coming soon) to guide your tagging efforts. You will notice that some of your guidance has already been tagged with one or more themes—we applied these programmatically during the data migration using keywords. You should evaluate the themes and make any desired changes, as well as verifying that all of your guidance is accurate and up to date. In the first screenshot above, for instance, the guidance links that have no themes will not be displayed to end users.

Admin webinar for templates and guidance

I will host a webinar focused on organizational templates and guidance topics sometime in May (TBD soon). In the interim please contact us with specific issues, questions, etc. that you would like to see covered in more detail.

And of course continue to report bugs, request enhancements, and/or tell us how much you like the new interface via GitHub Issues or the contact form.

Get your DMPTool stickers and postcards!

One last reminder that new marketing materials are in the works and scheduled to ship in May. Place your orders now!