DMPonline training debrief
As a follow up to our DMPonline training last week, here is a summary of actions and requests for further inputs from you. Feel free to leave comments on the blog or share your views in the training Slack channel or direct to our helpdesk. We’ll prioritise work as a result. You can jump to the sections that most interest you with the links below
- Conditional questions
- Department and school features
- Plan review functionality
- Other requests
- Machine-actionable DMP features
- Future DMPonline training
This will be deployed to DMPonline on Wednesday 29th April between 9-11am BST. There is one small usability fix (#2476) we have included in the current release. Additions to delay email notifications (#2475) will come following the Rails v.5 upgrade. We will also add conditional questions to the template preview in that forthcoming sprint (#2487).
We have added this to the user guide and released a video tutorial. The code also remains on the DMPonline-dev site which is our pre-production server. If you would like to trial things with colleagues there by all means do, but be aware that data is periodically overwritten and we frequently push new code there to perform User Acceptance Testing so changes will occur.
Two feature requests on conditional questions which we want to consult with you on are:
1. Adding as well as removing questions in response to a certain answers,
The current conditional questions logic means that the most full template is loaded as standard, which may be off-putting for users. Admin users requested functionality to add a series of extra questions in response to an answer, not just remove them. If lots of additional questions are included though, users could get frustrated as they can’t see the full extent of what they will be asked and keep getting additions when they thought their DMP was nearly complete.
- To what extent does the current functionality give you what you need?
- How high a priority is this feature to add, not just remove questions?
2. Adding custom email triggers depending on the departmental affiliation
Admins requested an extension to the conditional questions to adjust where email notifications are sent based on the department/school in question e.g. if a trigger is set for a large data volume, this should alert the data steward in the relevant department
- Where should the user affiliation be derived from? The original DMP creator or person answering the question?
- How many organisations would want to use this feature?
- Where does it rank in your order of priorities?
Department and School features
Two suggestions were made with respect to departments/schools which we would welcome your feedback on:
3. Allow users to have multiple departmental affiliations
Some of you were interested in users being able to have multiple affiliations. This is certainly feasible, but we would need to scope out the requirements more fully:
- How many organisations would like multiple departmental / school affiliations
- Would all the contacts for every departmental affiliation be sent email notifications or requests for plan review, or would there be a primary affiliation?
- How would these affiliations affect guidance displayed to the user?
- What other expectations / needs do you have for this?
4. Add multiple DMP feedback email addresses, not just one generic one
Some of you were interested in being able to specify different email addresses depending on the school/department, as you have different data stewards who offer DMP feedback.The preference was for each organisation to be able to configure this themselves by School/Dept.
- How many organisations would like to set multiple email addresses rather than having one generic helpdesk email?
- How and where would you like these email addresses to be displayed? On the user interface or just to be used when DMP feedback requests are emailed to admins?
- Is this requirement covered by the planned extension of the plan review functionality?
Several aspects were also raised in regard to the DMP feedback process. We plan to extend this functionality so would like to check our current thinking with you:
5. Enhance the notifications table to support allocation and progress tracking
In the last DMPonline user group, you asked us to extend the notifications table that you see when DMPs are submitted for feedback. This will help you assign reviews across the team and track progress. We have suggested some potential columns and dropdowns but there may be other things to add e.g. date submitted, data checked by data manager. See #2365
- To what extent do the extensions we have suggested meet your needs?
- What dropdown status indicators are needed, if any?
- How should the assignment work? All admins self-assign or have an ability to assign to others and notify by email?
- Does the process of assigning DMP reviewers work (we would list all users with this privilege) or do you want separate email addresses and notifications based on the users’ school/dept affiliation?
6. Add an ‘export comments’ option on the DMP download page
As part of your plan review workflows, you sometimes want to see all the comments with the plan. It was proposed to add an option to let users download the DMP with comments, just as you can choose to include a cover page or not.
- Is this a feature you would find useful?
- Given that comments are sometimes discussions between researchers not just plan reviews, are we ok to expose comments?
7. Make some comments ‘sticky’ and unable to be deleted
Some comments are critical and shouldn’t be deleted. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, we think we should change the permissions so only the commenter can delete their comment. In addition we propose having a separate overall reviewer comment and set of actions that appears at a DMP-wide level, not per question. This allows you to give summary guidance and any critical actions e.g. to change the consent and data sharing plans as it breaches DPA.
- Is it correct to only allow users to delete their own comment?
- Would an overall review comment field and ability to set actions be useful?
- Could this feature remove the need to download comments? Or perhaps this review comment could be downloaded rather than all comments per question?
- If a more formal review process and official institutional approval is needed, should this be tied to plan versioning (e.g. v.2 was reviewed and approved by the uni)
There were several other comments which we have raised as actions:
- We have raised a ticket to make the one-click plan creation link stable so it can be used elsewhere on your RDM support webpages (#2489)
- We’ll add the plan ID to the coversheet on DMP download. This is a persistent URL within DMPonline so can be used as a stable reference in other systems (#2478)
- We will update the progress bar so it doesn’t show anything when no questions have been completed ( #2480)
- We will cache your csv download preference (comma- tab- or hash-separated) from the usage dashboard page and apply this to all downloads of users and plans (#2490)
- We will fix the bug on sorting users by dept/school (#2491)
- We’ll prioritise the XML download so you can make better use of DMP content (#2237)
- Magdalena, Diana and Sarah will update funder templates. We’ll specifically look at Cancer Research UK, different calls for Swedish Research Council and the Future Leaders Fellows call. If there are others you want us to review, please let us know
Machine actionable DMP features
Our colleagues at the California Digital Library have been progressing some new features in our machine-actionable DMP work. The latest updates are available for trial on DMPonline-test. The test site does not have any of the custom, tenant branding. It’s where we trial new functionality for ongoing DMPRoadmap development and sign-off on it before we create a release and eventually deploy to DMPonline.
We encourage you to view and comment on the forthcoming features. They include:
- An integration with the Research Organisation Registry so we are using persistent identifiers for organisations (#2339)
- Adding project start and end dates to ‘Project details’ to conform with the RDA Common Standard for DMPs (#2409)
- Adding a contributor tab so we can list and give credit for the different roles using the CRediT taxonomy (#2349)
- An update to the API (#2390)
We anticipate changing some of the layouts and interface design around these features as you will see in the ticket comments. Your feedback will help us to define priorities on progressing this work and when we schedule deployment to DMPonline.
We were really pleased with how the training went and plan to do more. The length of the session was a little intense for us – and probably you too! As a result we plan to do shorter one-hour sessions focusing on a single feature. If there are topics you are particularly keen to see covered in this lockdown lessons series, please let us know.
Many of you had wanted to know more about the API so we’ll begin in late May with an introductory, walk-through demo where we go at a slow pace so we can all follow along in real time. We will also keep the DMPonline training slack channel open and use this for training events and possibly user groups so we can troubleshoot and talk through as you try out features.
