Category: DMP

DMPonline new feature – conditional questions

by sarah.jones • May 11, 2020 • Comments Off

One of our brand new features which we deployed to DMPonline in April 2020 is the ability to create conditional questions. This feature was requested via our Am…

DMPonline release notes: December 2019

by magdalena.drafiova • December 6, 2019 • Comments Off

It has been some time since our last release as we have been very busy with new DMPonline contracts and custom domain branding for enhanced subscribers. We have also been exploring different hosting options – considering moving to Amazon Web Services …

DMP services unite

by magdalena.drafiova • December 3, 2019 • Comments Off

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…

Different hosting options – which way forward?

by sarah.jones • November 12, 2019 • Comments Off

The Meeting of the Waters where the Amazon river starts. The darker Rio Negro waters and the sandy Solimões take 6km to fully merge due to different temperatures & pH levels.

Over the past few months we’ve been reconsidering DMPonline hosting – should we move to Amazon Web Services or remain with the University of Edinburgh. Brexit and ensuring we can meet our Service Level Agreements were two major concerns in this decision-making process. After investigating options, we have decided to remain with University of Edinburgh hosting. This blog post outlines our thoughts.

Keeping data within Europe

With all the uncertainties surrounding Brexit and a likely no-deal crash out, Amazon hosting was part of our contingency planning. Ironically it was after a week-long conference on the Amazon river that I sat in Sao Paolo airport and debated the issues with Edinburgh Legal. It transpired that hosting on Amazon Web Services wouldn’t solve any concerns. In contrast, the DCC would be considered as an external processor and any work we do via remote access would be deemed a data transfer. In the case of a no-deal-Brexit, the University has some model clauses which we will sign with overseas clients. These uphold us to European regulations such as GDPR to ensure the same protections are granted.

Controlling hosting

Another concern we had was ensuring the DCC team has full control over deployments. Over the past few years we have been contracting out technical support to EDINA, but with the growth of the developer team, we’re moving everything in-house. If the servers go down or any technical issues occur, we want to be able to liaise on fixes directly. Since we are containerising the application, it gives us more flexibility on deployment strategy. We’ve been investigating two main hosting routes – using Edinburgh University Information Services infrastructure and

Amazon Web Services

Investigating Edinburgh infrastructure and AWS

Ray and Sam met with the Edinburgh infrastructure team to understand what options are available for local hosting. There are several routes, varying the level of central and local control. We have opted for a centrally managed virtual machine to ensure all security updates are managed by the University and we can focus on maintaining the application. The University also has a forthcoming Docker Container service which may prove useful once out of test, as we use a dockerised setup.

As part of our planning process, we also took time to deploy a basic instance of the application to AWS. This helped us understand the technical options and anticipate workloads. AWS provides a large number of services which can be put together in a variety of ways. The options are changing rapidly, which adds to the complexity. We may end up needing to commit significant developer resource to continually monitor and maintain the deployment. Customers also raised several concerns about the implications of a move to AWS in terms of data access and permissions. Both the technical deployment and the legalities seem a bit of a rabbit warren which we’d rather avoid.

Permissions for AWS

Thanks to all the subscribers who gave permission for us to host on Amazon Web Services. The contract conditions required that we obtain explicit consent, hence initiating that process so we could keep all options open. While we are not going with AWS at the moment we will keep that in reserve as part of our disaster recovery planning.

As noted earlier, our final decision is to retain hosting at the University of Edinburgh but to redeploy on to IS infrastructure rather than work through EDINA. In the event of a no-deal-Brexit, the University has some model clauses which we will sign with overseas clients to uphold us to European regulations. We intend to change our local hosting arrangement in late 2019 / early 2020. There will be a small amount of downtime which we will announce in advance. Users will not notice any differences to the service.

DMP inspiration down under

by sarah.jones • August 20, 2019 • Comments Off

Image Galaxy, night, wallpapers and universe by Greg Rakozy

I’ve had a number of inspiring DMP discussions over the last few weeks, both Australian and European based. Here in Oz, funders do not require data management plans like they do in the UK and USA. This has led to the growth of quite different tools as institutions fit the DMP to local priorities.

CSIRO, QCIF and the University of Queensland all have data management tools with a strikingly similar feature set. Research Data Planner, RedBox and UQ Research Data Manager are more akin to data management systems than DMP tools. They integrate with other institutional systems and prioritise storage allocation, metadata capture and data publishing as incentives to engage researchers. It’s heartening to see that they have learned lessons from overseas – much attention has been given to streamlining questions and providing tailored guidance or pre-filled answers. This point came up at Macquarrie University too which is currently developing a DMP tool and will provide default answers that should suit most use cases. They are focusing on sensitive data as that’s the biggest risk and institutional concern. Indeed, institutions here seem very risk adverse and defensive of IP.

This prevailing institutional competitiveness is a weakeness for the data management field in my opinion. Three teams have developed very similar DMP tools while the sector as a whole would have been much better served by a coordinated national effort. Admittedly this is easier to say than do. Parallel DMPonline and DMPTool developments ran in the UK and USA for nearly 6 years before we started the DMPRoadmap partnership to have a common open source codebase from which to run each of our services.

Australian DMP tools are very impressive and there are a lot of ideas I plan to take back to inform DMPonline developments. I really like the API plug and play approach to allow organisations to join up whatever systems they have in place. I hope to coordinate a co-located workshop during the RDA Plenary on 18-20 March 2020 in Melbourne to discuss global DMP initiatives and what opportunities there are for wider collaboration. These could be around the common standard for DMP, sharing user requirements, code, developer peer exchange, training or more. If you are involved in DMP work and want to get involved please reach out to me.

There have been interesting European DMP talks over the last few weeks too. Benjamin Faure and colleagues at DMP OPIDoR in France have made a number of useful extensions to the DMPRoadmap codebase. These include one click plan creation from the public templates page, an API extension to pull out themes, and adding a dataset component to the underlying data model. We have also continued our DMPonline outreach, running drop-ins and scheduling the next user group for 17th September in London. This will follow a full day RDMF on costing data management on 16th at the British Library – register here. We are also growing the DMPonline team and held interviews for a new developer on Monday.

I’ll be giving a DMP webinar for ARDC on lessons from Europe tomorrow. Slides are available and a video is forthcoming.

DMPonline release notes: April 2019

by magdalena.drafiova • April 26, 2019 • Comments Off

DMPonline release notes: April 2019
We do appreciate your feedback, as it is very valuable for us to know what works well for you, or anything else you wish to be fixed, improved or deployed! If you are interested to see what we are currently working o…

DMPonline user group: where next?

by sarah.jones • April 18, 2019 • Comments Off

We’ve run a couple of user group sessions over the last few weeks. Many thanks to those who attended in Amsterdam and Manchester. It was particularly helpful to hear how you are using the tool and what changes you would like. The DCC team met on Monday to process your feedback and have set the following priorities:

Full text API (#2086)
You wanted an extension of the plans API to allow authorised admin users to pull out the full text of DMPs for their organisation. Sam has already developed this but it takes a long time to run in real-time so we are going to harvest the data overnight. This requires some changes to our infrastructure but we should be able to release the API later this month.

Reviewer admin permission (#2087)
It seems that many of you have multiple reviewers of plans and would like this to be a separate role that can be assigned by the org admin. We’re in the process of adding this, and will adjust our contract so you’re not paying more for multiple plan reviewers.

Adding a field for School / Division / Department (#2088)
We plan to add one field to the edit profile page for which you can name and define a controlled value list. This will allow you to identify the sub-unit affiliation of your users. In time we could extend the functionality to allow you to pull stats on this (e.g. plans by school) and to allow customisations to be done by sub-unit level. Currently it is only the guidance that works in their vein.

Conditional questions (#1772)
This is a bigger piece of feature development, which we have scheduled for the summer months. It was top priority for you so we will add it first.

Custom section on funder templates (#2072)
Many of you have the same custom section on funder templates and want to create it once and apply across all / a selection. This will be provided as a new feature in Summer 2019.

Plan versioning
Again, this is a bigger piece of feature development, which we have scheduled for the summer months.

There were a number of smaller items raised during discussion too. These have been added as tickets (see the ‘user group’) label and will be addressed during the coming few sprints.

Other areas of interest which represent larger feature development and are to be placed into development plans have been captured on the ‘Future enhancements’ section of the wiki for now.

Manchester’s case study on using DMPonline was really inspiring and we wanted to ask how we can support others to do some similar things. We realise not everyone has development effort in-house so we wondered whether it would help if we wrote a script to send you weekly/monthly email notifications of new users and plans so you can monitor usage and start to interact with and assist users more? Let us know what you think.

We are due to push out a new release immediately after Easter. Amongst other things, this includes:

bug fixes for guidance / comment display when text runs outside the box
adjustments to comment notification so users don’t receive multiple emails when you provide feedback
display of themed guidance in ‘customise template’ preview
table-styling fixes
plans by template statistics

You can see these on the test site now and in live deployment soon.

All feedback welcome!

Magdalena, Diana, Sam & Sarah

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