UC3 New Year Series: Looking Ahead through 2025 for the DMP Tool

We’re gearing up for a big year over at the DMP Tool!  Thousands of researchers and universities across the world use the DMP Tool to create data management plans (DMPs) and keep up with funder requirements and best practices.  As we kick off 2025, we wanted to share some of our major focus areas to improve the application, introduce powerful new capabilities, and engage with the wider community.  We always want to be responsive to evolving community needs and policies, so these plans could change if needed.

New DMP Tool Application

Our primary goal for the year is to launch the rebuild of the DMP Tool application.  You can read more detail about this work in this blog post, but it will include the current functionality of the tool plus much more, still in a free, easy to use website.  The plan is still to release this by the end of 2025, likely in the later months (no exact date yet).  We’re making good progress towards a usable prototype of core functionality, like creating an account and making a template with basic question types.

In-development screenshot of account profile page in the new tool. Page is not final and is subject to change.In-development screenshot of editing a template in the new tool. Page is not final and is subject to change.

Another common request is to offer more functionality within our API.  For example, people can already read registered DMPs through the API, but many librarians want to be able to access draft DMPs to integrate a feedback flow on their own university systems.  As part of our rebuild, we are moving to a system that is going to use the same API on the website as the one available to external partners (GraphQL for those interested).  This will allow almost any functionality on the website to be available through the API.  This should be released at the same time as the new tool, with documentation and training to come. Get your integration ideas ready!

Finally, we are continuing to work on our related works matching, tracking down published outputs and connecting them to a registered DMP.  This is part of an overall effort to make DMPs more valuable throughout the lifecycle of a project, not just at the grant submission stage, and to reduce burden on researchers, librarians, and funders to connect information within research projects.  It’s too early to tell when this will be released publicly on the website, but likely will come some time after the rebuild launch.

AI Exploration

While most of our focus will be on the above projects, we are in the early stages of exploring topics for future development of the DMP Tool.  One big area is in the use of generative AI to assist in reviewing or writing data management plans.  We’ve heard interest from both researchers and librarians in using AI to help construct plans.  People sometimes write their DMP the night before a grant is due and request feedback without enough time for librarians to provide it.  AI could help review these plans, if trained on relevant policy, to give immediate feedback when there’s not enough time for human review.

We’re also interested in exploring the possibility of an AI assistant to help write a DMP.  We know many people are more comfortable answering a series of multiple choice questions than they are in crafting a narrative, and it’s possible we could help turn that structured data into the narrative format that funders require, making it easier for researchers to write a plan and keeping the structured data for machine actionability. Another option is an AI chatbot within the tool that can help provide our best practice guidance in a more interactive format.  It will be important for us to balance taking some of the writing burden off of researchers while making sure that they are still the one responsible for the content within it.

These ideas are in early phases – it’s something we’ll be exploring with some external partners but likely not releasing to the public this year – however we’re excited about their potential to make best practice DMPs easier to create.

Community Engagement

While we’ll sometimes be heads down working on these big projects, we also want to make sure we’re communicating to and participating in the wider community more than ever.  As we get towards a workable prototype of the new tool, we’ll be running more user research sessions.  The initial sessions, reviewed here, offered a lot of valuable insight that shaped the current designs, and we know once people get their hands on the new tool they’ll have more feedback.  If you haven’t already, sign up here to be on the list for future invites. 

We also want to be more transparent with the community about our operations and goals.  We’ve started putting together documents within our team about our Mission and Vision for the DMP Tool, which we’ll be sharing with everyone shortly.  Over 2025, we want to continue to work on artifacts like those we can share regularly so that you all know what our priorities are.  One goal is to create a living will, recommended by the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, outlining how we’d handle the potential winddown of CDL managing the DMP Tool.  This is a sensitive area because we have no plans to wind down the tool, and don’t want to give the impression that its going away!  But it’s important for trust and transparency for us to have a plan in place if things change, as we know people care about the tool and their data within it.

Finally, we’ll be wrapping up our pilot project with ARL this year, where we had 10 institutions pilot implementation of machine-actionable DMPs at their university.  We’ve seen prototypes and mockups for integrations related to resource allocation, interdepartmental communication, security policies, AI-review, and so much more. We’ve brought on Clare Dean to help us create resources and toolkits, disseminate the findings, and host a series of webinars about what we’ve learned to help others implement at their own universities.  We’ll be presenting talks on the DMP Tool at IDCC25 in February, RDAP in March, and we plan to submit for other conferences throughout the year, including IDW/RDA in October, to share what we’ve learned with others. We hope to continue working with DMP-related groups in RDA to ensure our work is compatible with others in the space, and we’re following best practices for API development.

We hope you’re as excited for these projects as we are!  We’re a small team but we work with many amazing partners that help us achieve ambitious goals.  Keep an eye on this space for more to come.