Category: user group

2020 has just started and we have already run our first user group in the Netherlands to ensure that we have a great start to the New Year! We gave an update on all the hard work done since the last user group in Autumn 2019 and explained plans for the coming year. Most importantly, we wanted to offer an open space for discussion and get as much suggestions and ideas from users as possible to ensure that DMPonline works well for you. Below is a summary from the day.

Our agenda for the day was packed with interesting talks, demos and space for discussion (there are links for the presentation slides in the agenda). Our key topic was revising the create plan wizard and template selection. We were also joined by the European Commission, NWO, ZonMw and FCCN to consider funder use cases as funders are becoming more and more involved in using our tool. 

An overview of presentations

We started the day with a roundtable intro and for the first time we made the user group open for attendees who wanted to join us remotely – thanks to those dialling in from Portugal and the UK. Sarah then presented the exciting work we have done over the past year. Sam showed a demo of full text API, and we have discussed forthcoming features planned during a December team meeting with our collaborators from CDL and DMPOPIDoR. The main planned work for the upcoming weeks is to improve usage statistics and make these more responsive, and easier to read and analyse for your institution. We are planning to upgrade to Rails v.5 and make DMPs more machine actionable (e.g. integration with F1000 Open Research Platform, FundRef, ROR and assigning DOIs…).

Magdalena presented some ideas on changing the display for the plan creation wizard. We have found that users don’t always understand the logic behind this or know how to select a certain template e.g. their uni requirement for PhD students. We presented four alternate wireframes and discussed which most people found clearest. The preference seems to be the researcher setting two filters (organisation and funder) then being presented with a drop down menu of all available templates. We plan to consult further on this within various contexts (with our collaborators in CDL, and our subscribed institutions outside Netherlands) as we need to ensure any change will work for all.

Carlos Casorrán from the European Commission explained the future plans for data management beyond H2020 under the next framework programme. Data management will continue to be in line with the FAIR principles, and data management plans should become living documents, have PIDs and rich metadata. An outline DMP is expected at the proposal stage and the DMP will be mandatory whether data are open or not. It is still to be decided whether evaluation of DMPs in proposals will come under impact or move to excellence which would give greater visibility and weight. Also the output to be covered in a DMP will not be just the data, but also the software, tools, workflows, protocols, algorithms or notebooks.

Your DMPonline feature wish list

A number of ideas were raised in discussions throughout the day. These are summarised below with thoughts on potential new features:

Enhanced DMP feedback functionality (#2365)

Data Stewards in the Netherlands are making great use of the new department feature to understand where researchers are based. This allows them to assign the right data steward when plans come in for review. There is a desire to better track the status of the plan review. So for instance, understanding whether the DMP has already been picked up by a data steward, whether the review has been started, or whether some comments were already added so work is not duplicated amongst the reviewers. We intend to add some basic status tracking to the plan feedback notification table. This will display the department (if in use), allow anyone with reviewer privileges to be allocated or to self-select a plan and will provide basic status indications to show whether work is in progress. You also suggested that we rename the ‘Comments’ tab to ‘Feedback’ so it’s more obvious to end users (#2366)

API extension to tag users with departments (#2235)

One feature that got raised in the last user group but we’ve not had time to work on yet is developing an API extension to allow institutions to extract all their user details, match these with data from local HR or other systems to match to departments, and issue an update to us so that the department of each user is selected in their profile. This saves existing users updating the entry and will make other features like allocation of plan reviews to data stewards work more effectively. You would also like us to add the department to the registration workflow for any new users.

Usage statistics (#2367)

We discussed the planned statistics work and got some additional requests. Dutch unis would like to know how many users come from each department and also how many plan reviews are associated with each department. Since we’re working on these features currently we welcome any other ideas. You would also like to be able to control the dashboard by personalising which usage statistics display. This may be beyond our current scope but we can explore options for more personalisation in future.

Ownership of plans (#2368)

The current logic behind the ownership of the plan is that when a user leaves/changes the institution in their profile, any DMPs also transfer as they are owned by the original creator. This means the plans will disappear from institutional statistics and administrator view permissions are lost. Institutions would like to have access to the plan, even when the user changes their affiliation, since the data may still be stored there and the plan approvals and funding assignment is linked to the institution the researcher was based at when they created the plan. In order to do this, we will need to update the terms and conditions for our users to make clear that affiliated institutions will retain access.

One other small feature you requested was to add a guidance configuration option on the admin interface so each institution can decide which guidance is selected by default (#2369). Currently it is a site-wide setting that DCC guidance is applied by default but we could easily adjust this.

Last but not least, would you find it useful to add a new field to user profile where the user could edit their profile to say they are e.g. PhD students? Get in touch with us to let us know.

Thanks and keep in touch!

As usual, we are very grateful that so many of you could make it for the day. It is lovely to see our community growing, and we are very lucky to work with you all. It is also fantastic to see that our DMPonline community is becoming more international and that funders are becoming more active in using DMPonline so that you get the space to interact with them more.

Just so you know, we are already planning our next user group for Spring 2020 in London, and we will be in touch with you about further details.

Last but not least – as always, we are keen to hear from you about how you use the tool and how we can improve it, so please feel free to contact us at the details below:

• Customer Development Manager, Magalena at magdalena.drafiova@ed.ac.uk
• DMPonline helpdesk at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk
• Social media: Twitter @mdDCC1, @DMPonline, Facebook and LinkedIn

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