Announcing the DMP Tool Rebuild

TL;DR

• We’re starting work on an ambitious project rebuilding the DMP Tool application
• The rebuilt tool, coming hopefully some time next year, will use machine-actionable structures for the whole DMP and have many new features
• The current site will remain as it is until the new version is released, though we’re limiting work on it to resolving critical issues
• Sign up for our newsletter to hear occasional updates about this work!

History of the DMP Tool

Over the past 13 years, the DMP Tool has grown from a grassroots tool beginning at 8 institutions to one that serves thousands of universities across multiple continents. We’ve had a few big milestones in that time, such as adding the ability to register a DMP-ID and publish a DMP publicly, and creating the admin interface to allow universities to provide custom guidance on templates. The tool started in response to new requirements from U.S. funders for data management plans (DMPs; also known as data management and sharing plans–DMSPs), and our growth follows the research and library communities’ needs in this area.

Adding Machine-Actionable Functionality

Now, it’s time for our next big milestone in the DMP Tool: fully machine-actionable data management and sharing plans (maDMSPs).  In 2022, the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law, requiring DMPs submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be “machine-readable.”  Machine-readable, or actionable, means that information is structured in a way that enables automatic connections and transformations without the need for manual intervention.  

Excerpt from the CHIPS & Science Act, referring to NSF-funded research

On the current DMP Tool, some parts of the DMP have been made machine-actionable already, such as the DMP-ID and metadata.  When you go to a registered DMP’s landing page, like this public plan for example, you see structure information like title and contributors pulled from a database.  Other systems can work with that information through our public API, allowing for integrations with various research applications.

Now, we want to make all parts of the DMP – such as the narrative responses to the questions describing the plan – machine-actionable, and open up more tooling to work with structured maDMSPs, as was outlined in a Dear Colleague letter in 2019.

There are many benefits to maDMSPs, such as:

• Having persistent identifiers that allow tracking of data publications and connections to other PIDs, like ORCIDs and ROR and DOIs
• Creating opportunities for sharing information about DMPs between different campus units
• Allowing integrations with research systems, like electronic lab notebooks, that can help researchers use DMPs in existing workflows
• Establishing links to research outputs, like published datasets, that came from a DMP, to help link work and track compliance with the statements in a DMP

Rebuilding the DMP Tool

To implement these major changes, we realized a significant overhaul of the current DMP Tool was needed to accommodate these new features and underlying structural changes.  For years, the DMP Tool rebuild has been a regular discussion point; we’ve long recognized its areas for improvement and regularly fielded requests for specific features.  However, our team of two had limited ability to implement many of our, and the community’s, grand ideas. 

Fortunately, we were able to obtain funding from an NSF EAGER grant that allowed us to explore a rebuild of the application, which would allow us to develop these features of the new tool and bring about these needed changes.

Our official rebuild work kicked off in April 2024 with a week-long workshop with our new team of consultants led by Paula Reeves from Reeves Branding and Zach Antony from Cazinc Digital. During that week, we dove into every aspect of the current application, mapping out existing features and brainstorming how to incorporate new ones. This included the machine-actionable data and formatting required for interoperability and the structured metadata needed to fuel the creation of machine-actionable data management plans. We reviewed the existing architecture, explored user personas, and redesigned workflows to facilitate project-centric planning. We also focused on building and customizing templates, adding guidance tools, and ensuring accessibility as we outlined development timelines and workflows for future phases. 

The seven team members at the rebuild kickoff meeting

We’re excited to also get in a few top feature requests as well as maDMSP functionality, though we will be rolling them out in stages and cannot get to everything.  Some of the areas we have currently prioritized include:

• Additional API functionality, such as the ability with unpublished or in-progress DMPs
• Ability to upload and register existing DMPs
• Improved account management, such as being able to add secondary emails
• Increased flexibility in creating templates, such as additional question types and streamlined ability to copy templates
• Finding and connecting DMPs to published research outputs like datasets
• Improved notification, comment, and feedback systems

Since the kick-off, the designers have been developing wireframes for the new tool, while we’ve added some new machine actionable elements to the current DMP Tool for testing.  We’ve been working with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) on a pilot project with 10 institutions, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, gathering feedback from their use of the tool and conducting interviews about their efforts developing local integrations. Our first visit was to Northwestern University, which can read more about on ARL’s blog, with more coming soon.

What’s next

To stay focused on delivering this work, and due to the site’s technological constraints, we will be limiting updates to the current application. We’ll prioritize resolving critical issues while taking feature requests as requests for the new site. 

We can’t wait to share more information over time about this project as it develops.  While it’s too early to announce a release date, we’re hopeful it will be sometime before the end of next year.  We recently wrapped up user testing on the wireframes, and will have a blog post coming soon about what we found.  We’ll also be sharing information at upcoming conferences, such as a talk at IDCC25 called “Piloting maDMSPs for Streamlined Research Data Management Workflows.”  Keep an eye on this space, and sign up for our newsletter, to hear occasional updates about this work!