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Virtual DMPonline User Group, 27 April 2022

| 12 May 2022

It was great to welcome back members of the DMPonline user community. We discussed engaging topics such as new features for DMPonline and DMP Roadmap, development priorities and a review of community events. The input from participants was excellent. 

The purpose of this piece is to give those who could not attend an overview of what was discussed, as well as the opportunity to get involved by providing feedback. We are always grateful for your input. 

Welcome to new institutions 

Since the last meeting in November 2021, we are delighted to welcome the following new members to our community: 

  • University of Humanistic Studies, The Netherlands 
  • Munster Technological University, Republic of Ireland 
  • Newcastle University, UK 
  • University of Plymouth, UK 

We thank all of them for choosing DMPonline as a tool for their data management services.  

DMPonline team update 

You've probably had correspondence and interaction with new names in our team so it would be good to give you a brief overview. 

We’re happy to welcome a new developer, Glenys Jacob, who joined us in January 2022. 

Magdalena Drafiova is the happy mother of a baby. While she is on maternity leave, Diana Sisu will cover her role as Customer Manager. 

We are also looking into getting more developer resource as we have been understaffed for quite a while now and were not able to tackle any of the major features you would like to see. We are working closely with other partners on DMP Roadmap and the team has expanded recently with the addition of the DMP Assistant colleagues from Canada. DMP Assistant is a national service, offered by Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) in collaboration with host institution University of Alberta. It is available in both French and English.  

New features from DMPRoadmap and DMPTool 

A new release of DMPRoadmap was made available, consisting of new exciting new features that users have asked for in the past, as well as improvements to usability. 

In terms of usability, the new release will introduce collapsible guidance. This will enable users to move the guidance/comments tab out of the way, thus enlarging the text box for responses to questions. This should make it easier for users working on small screens. 

There are exciting new changes to the Project Details page, where users will now be able to add machine-readable information such as a research domain and indicate whether there are ethical concerns associated with the project. 

Another new feature is the introduction of a new tab, where users can enter research outputs for the project by adding information such as the type of data that will be generated, repositories that will be used, metadata standards, and any licences associated. 

Some of the features were added to DMPonline in early May. However, as some of you pointed out, features such as the introduction of research outputs may require organisations to carry out some preparation work. To prepare accordingly, you can read about the research output feature in our blog post and leave feedback via our survey. 

We also highlighted the new Public Plans page our colleagues have released for DMPTool. It allows institutional administrators to feature certain plans (which you liked, even for plans that are only visible within your organisations) and provides various facets to filter for plans by funder or institution.  

Feed-back on user groups and DMPonline priorities 

We also provided an update about the priorities for future development that resulted from the user group in June 2021. We had planned to vote on features regularly, but as we have not managed to resource the team appropriately, progress on these are limited. However, we think it is important to keep you updated about the top priorities.  

The priorities agreed at the user group in June 2021 were: 

  • Versioning 
  • Integration with CRIS systems 
  • Rework guidance 

For Versioning, a specification of requirements was created in collaboration with the DMPRoadmap team and was presented at the last user group for further feedback. Your comments have been included in the specification, but time constraints and shortage of development effort means no further progress has been made on implementation.  

With regards to integration with CRIS systems, one institution is working with PURE on an integration with DMPonline using the API. Unfortunately, API bugs have affected implementation. Most API bugs have been fixed once the fixes are deployed, we will continue to work with Elsevier on this workflow. 

No further progress has been made on tailoring guidance. 

Review of DMPonline events 

We invited feedback on DMPonline community events. We regularly ask you for feedback to ensure our sessions meet your needs and with in-person events slowly returning, we were interested to learn from you where you would like to meet us. If you would like to provide input on the format, frequency and content of future DMPonline events, please fill out our survey which is open for submissions until 10 June 2022. 

We will combine the survey results and input from the user group into a blog post and use your ideas to start planning events from autumn 2022 onwards. 

Keep in touch 

Please join our next drop-in session on 17 May. Guest speaker will be Dr. Mellanie Geijen, Data Steward, Open University Netherlands. See https://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dmponline-drop-sessions for details on how to join. 

You can also discuss any of our new features on the user group mailing list.