Crossposted from the FAIR Island website The California Digital Library (CDL), University of California Gump South Pacific Research Station, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS),…
Category: #ActiveDMPs
Furthering Open Science through Research Data Management Services
As I begin my second year at CDL, I am excited to outline the objectives and key activities for my work: furthering research data management…
Effective Data Practices: new recommendations to support an open research ecosystem
We are pleased to announce the release of a new report written with our partners at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of…
DMP Roadmap Team at the maDMP Hackathon
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.…
Introducing the FAIR Island Project
Imagine a dream scenario for Open Data advocates: the field station with an optimal data policy for open access, mandatory registration requirements for all research…
2019: a DMP year in review
2019 was a pivotal year for DMPonline. Having introduced a new subscription model in November 2018 to sustain the DCC-led service, the last 12 months saw us develop a solid user base. This uptake has allowed us to grow the team and increase our engagem…
Roadmap back to school edition
- 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.
- 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
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.
RDA 11th Plenary Berlin: Active DMP Excitement
Now that the dust has settled, here are a few thoughts and reflections from March’s 11th RDA Plenary in Berlin, with a focus on Data Management Plans (DMPs).
DMP Common Standards WG
My participation in this plenary began with the DMP Common Standards WG meeting tasked with finding practical ways to make DMPs machine-actionable. We were pleasantly surprised by the number of participants, most of who perhaps aren’t interested in the technical minutiae of the WG conference calls, but are nevertheless interested in the general discussion and wish to be included in shaping the outputs and recommendations of this group.* [Theme 1]
More importantly, many participants had questions to ask and insights to offer during the Towards a Common Data Model moderated discussion to the extent that, unavoidably, many conversations spilled over into the coffee break and the immaculate corridors of Berlin’s Congress Center! This happily points to a clear need to listen and gather insights from as wide a stakeholder base as possible if we want our recommendations to be useful to the widest possible audience.
Points of interest:
- Lightning talks where we presented various DMP-related tools’ approaches to modelling this subject area. [Slides]
- By Common Data Model we mean finding a way to let funders ask their questions and receive answers in a standard, well-defined way that does not restrict expressiveness and represents the very diverse approaches and requirements that different groups and organisations have.* [Theme 2]
- DMPRoadmap data model’s emphasis on KISS principle (Keep It Simple & Straightforward):
Plans use Templates – Templates have Phases, which contain Sections with Questions in them. - Missing DMP data may be the result of a question that was never asked. [DCC‘s Kevin Ashley]
- There may be a middle ground between free-text and machine-readable content in the concept of Themes.
- More emphasis on integration between APIs, data sources and tools as opposed to simply exporting/sharing DMPs.
Emerging themes:
- The first emerging theme was convergence & collaboration: collect as many user stories as possible for maximum inclusivity.
- By extension, the need to avoid overspecification & overengineering in the WG’s outputs, to prevent having to shoehorn diverse standards and methodologies into a narrow data/metadata model in the future.
- This is what makes many recommendations that look good on paper unusable in the real world.
Exposing DMPs WG
Another full room at P11, this time for the Exposing DMPs WG meeting:
- Lightning talk presentations on the subject of sharing DMP content by Angus Whyte (DCC), David Carr (Wellcome), Elena Zudilova-Seinstra (Elsevier RDM Solutions), Iain Hrynaszkiewicz (BMC Research Notes), Sandra Gesing (Open Science Framework), Stephanie Simms (CDL).
- Use cases for exposing DMPs
- Real-time voting: Which use cases should we spend our time on? – showed great interest on the subjects of Integration and Evaluation.
Favourite moment
Resolutely debugging the RDA Metadata Standards Catalog with Alex Ball during a coffee break – having coffee standing up Italian style, furiously typing into laptops & tablets, we must have been a sight!
RDA Plenaries are an excellent opportunity for learning and collaboration, as there’s so much experience around in many different subject areas – so many user stories, and so many different perspectives to stimulate conversation and one’s interest in previously unexplored topics.
Full room at DMP Common Standards WG… | …and at Exposing DMPs WG! |
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Photos: Tomasz Miksa, Jimmy Angelakos
On the right track(s) – DCC release draws nigh
Eurostar by red hand records CC-BY-ND
Preliminary DMPRoadmap out to test
We’ve made a major breakthrough this month, getting a preliminary version of the DMPRoadmap code out to test on DMPonline, DMPTuuli and DMPMelbourne. This has taken longer …
RDA-DMP movings and shakings
An update on RDA and our Active DMP work, courtesy of Stephanie Simms
RDA Plenary 9
We had another productive gathering of #ActiveDMPs enthusiasts at the Research Data Alliance (RDA) plenary meeting in Barcelona (5-7 Apr). Just prior to the meet…