As the National Institutes of Health (NIH) new Policy for Data Management and Sharing goes into effect, NIH-funded researchers may be wondering how to ensure they comply with the new requirements. Dryad’s curated data publishing service provides …
Category: data management plan
Different hosting options – which way forward?
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…
Active, actionable DMPs
Roadmap project IDCC briefing
We had a spectacularly productive IDCC last month thanks to everyone who participated in the various meetings and events focused on the DMPRoadmap project and machine-actionable DMPs. Thank you, thank you! Sarah has since …
Roadmap retrospective: 2016
- More publishers articulated clear data policies, e.g., Springer Nature Research Data Policies apply to over 600 journals.
- PLOS now requires an ORCID for all corresponding authors at the time of manuscript submission to promote discoverability and credit.
- The Gates Foundation reinforced support for open access and open data by preventing funded researchers from publishing in journals that do not comply with its policy, which came into force at the beginning of 2017; this includes non-compliant high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, and NEJM.
- Researchers throughout the world continued to circumvent subscription access to scholarly literature by using Sci-Hub (Bohannon, 2016).
- Library consortia in Germany and Taiwan canceled (or threatened to cancel) subscriptions to Elsevier journals because of open-access related conflicts, and Peru canceled over a lack of government funding for expensive paid access (Schiermeier and Rodríguez Mega, 2017).
- Reproducibility continued to gain prominence, e.g., the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on Rigor and Reproducibility came into force for most NIH and AHRQ grant proposals received in 2016.
- The Software Citation Principles (Smith et al., 2016) recognized software as an important product of modern research that needs to be managed alongside data and other outputs.
- Where and how do DMPs fit in the overall research lifecycle (i.e., beyond grant proposals)?
- Which data could be fed automatically from other systems into DMPs (or vice versa)?
- What information can be validated automatically?
- Which systems/services should connect with DMP tools?
- What are the priorities for integrations?
Getting our ducks in a row
Recent activity on the Roadmap project encompasses two major themes: 1) machine-actionable data management plans and 2) kicking off co-development of the shared codebase.
Image credit: ‘Get Your Ducks in a Row‘ CC-BY-SA by Cliff Johnson
Machine-actionable DMPs
The first of these has been a hot topic of conversation among stakeholders in the data management game for some time now, although most use the phrase “machine-readable DMPs.” So what do we mean by machine-actionable DMPs? Per the Data Documentation Initiative definition, “this term refers to information that is structured in a consistent way so that machines can be programmed against the structure.” The goal of machine-actionable DMPs, then, is to better facilitate good data management and reuse practices (think FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) by enabling:
- Institutions to manage their data
- Funders to mine the DMPs they receive
- Infrastructure providers to plan their resources
- Researchers to discover data
This term is consistent with the Research Data Alliance Active DMPs Interest Group and the FORCE11 FAIR DMPs group mission statements, and it seems to capture what we’re all thinking: i.e., we want to move beyond static text files to a dynamic inventory of digital research methods, protocols, environments, software, articles, data… One reason for the DMPonline-DMPTool merger is to develop a core infrastructure for implementing use cases that make this possible. We still need a human-readable document with a narrative, but underneath the DMP could have more thematic richness with value for all stakeholders.
A recent Cern/RDA workshop presented the perfect opportunity to consolidate our notes and ideas. In addition to the Roadmap project members, Daniel Mietchen (NIH) and Angus Whyte (DCC) participated in the exercise. We conducted a survey of previous work on the topic (we know we didn’t capture everything so please alert us to things we missed) and began outlining concrete use cases for machine-actionable DMPs, which we plan to develop further through community engagement over the coming months. Another crucial piece of our presentation was a call to make DMPs public, open, discoverable resources. We highlighted existing efforts to promote public DMPs (e.g., the DMPTool Public DMPs list, publishing exemplary DMPs in RIO Journal) but these are just a drop in the bucket compared to what we might be able to do if all DMPs were open by default.
You can review our slides here. And please send feedback—we want to know what you think!
Let the co-development begin!
Now for the second news item: our ducks are all in a row and work is underway on the shared Roadmap codebase.
We open with a wistful farewell to Marta Ribeiro, who is moving on to an exciting new gig at the Urban Big Data Centre. DCC has hired two new developers to join our ranks—Ray Carrick and Jimmy Angelakos—both from their sister team at EDINA. The finalized co-development team commenced weekly check-in calls and in the next week or two we’ll begin testing the draft co-development process by adding three features from the roadmap:
- Enhanced institutional branding
- Funder template export
- OAuth link an ORCID
In the meantime, Brian is completing the migration to Rails 4.2 and both teams are getting our development environments in place. Our intention is to iterate on the process for a few sprints, iron out the kinks, and then use it and the roadmap as the touchstones for a monthly community developer check-in call. We hope this will provide a forum for sharing use cases and plans for future work (on all instances of the tool) in order to prioritize, coordinate, and alleviate duplication of effort.
The DCC interns have also been plugging away at their respective projects. Sam Rust just finished building some APIs on creating plans and extracting guidance, and is now starting work on the statistics use case. Damodar Sójka meanwhile is completing the internationalization project, drawing from work done by the Canadian DMP Assistant team. We’ll share more details about their work once we roll it back into the main codebase.
Next month the UC Berkeley Web Services team will evaluate the current version of DMPonline to flag any accessibility issues that need to be addressed in the new system. We’ve also been consulting with Rachael Hu on UX strategy. We’re keeping track of requests for the new system and invite you to submit feedback via GitHub issues.
Stay tuned to GitHub and our blog channels for more documentation and regular progress updates.
The 20:51 sprint (Roadmap team-building: UK edition)
This week we hosted the DMPTool team to flesh out our plans for ‘roadmap’ – the joint codebase we’re building together based on DMPonline and DMPTool. The key focus was reviewing and prioritising tasks for an initial release. &n…
Hallelujah and praise the LARD! The first London Area Research Data group meeting
This is a guest post by Laurence Horton, Data Librarian at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) It was a hot and stormy day; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when I dodged … Continue reading →
All that Big Data Is Not Going to Manage Itself: Part Two
Yesterday’s blog post described some of the federal government initiatives that have driven data management requirements over the past ten years or so. “Data management” is a hot job area right now, and if you tilt the digital stewardship universe a certain direction, almost everything we do falls under the rubric of “data management.” Data […]
DMPonline at OpenAIRE-COAR 2014
On 20th May 2014 I presented DMPonline at an OpenAIRE-COAR 2014 pre-conference workshop in Athens, Greece.read more