Summer 2020 DMPTool Release

We’re very pleased to announce the release of several major new features for the DMPTool! This includes:

• Integration with the Research Organization Registry (ROR) and Funder Registry (Fundref)
• The ability to create conditional questions and set email notifications within DMP templates
• Integration with Google Analytics for usage statistics
• The ability to connect additional grant contributors (and their ORCIDs) to a plan

The release notes are available in the DMPTool GitHub and detailed descriptions are available below.

Research Organization and Funder Registry Integration

ROR is a registry of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for research organizations, which are defined as any organization that conducts, produces, manages, or touches research. ROR has generated identifiers for over 91,000 organizations so far. The Crossref Funder Registry (Fundref) is a registry of grant-giving organizations and has created over 20,000 identifiers so far. We now have 1,582 unique organizations matched with their RORs or Funder IDs within the DMPTool. 

Utilizing these identifiers within a DMP is a key step towards a truly machine-actionable DMP (maDMP). Employing PIDs such as ROR and Fundref in DMPs facilitates the linking of people, grants, and organizations, and enables better tracking and discovery of research outputs by institution. These identifiers will be included in our upcoming maDMP JSON export feature, which is due to be released in late summer and is key in enabling maDMP interactions via API integrations.

Snippet from our upcoming API utilizing the RDA Common Standard schema and incorporating RORs

Organizational administrators of the DMPTool may notice an increase in the number of users affiliated with your institution. As part of integrating with ROR and Fundref, we have connected 4,750 previously un-affiliated users with their host institution by matching email domains. 

Conditional Questions and Email Notifications

DMPTool administrators that take advantage of the feature to create or customize templates will be excited to learn that you can now reduce the number of questions included in a customized template by skipping questions. For example, if a research project is not creating or using any sensitive data, you can now modify a template in order to skip questions related to special handling of sensitive data.

Additionally, the new feature includes the ability to set email notifications that are triggered if a user selects a specific answer. For example, you may want to create an alert for large data volumes. 

Read more about utilizing these new features in our documentation or watch this video tutorial created by our DMPRoadmap colleagues at DMPOnline. 

Two important things to note about creating conditions and email notifications: 

1.  If you are creating a new template, save all questions first and then set the conditions on them.   

2. This feature only works on questions with structured answers including checkbox, drop downs or radio buttons. You can add a condition on a single option or a combination of responses. 

There has also been interest in enabling questions to be displayed when the user answers a conditional question instead of hiding them (the current default). We are currently consulting with the community to better understand the use cases, functionality, and scope of technical work to add this feature. This will be released after we complete our current work migrating to Rails v5 (Summer 2020). 

Google Analytics

Users can now use Google Analytics to track web statistics for an organizational account within the DMPTool. Statistics retrieved by Google Analytics include: number of sessions, users, average session duration, and pageviews. 

Users who are already using Google Analytics for tracking may want to add the DMPTool to their account. Connecting DMPTool to Google Analytics is a quick and easy process — simply copy the tracker code from your Google Analytics account and paste it into your Organizational Details page in the DMPTool and you’re good to go.

For further details about adding your DMPTool account to Google Analytics, please see our help documentation. Existing DMPTool Usage Statistics also remain accessible from within the DMPTool for all organizational administrators. 

Support for Multiple Contributors

A new tab entitled “Contributors” is now visible within the Create Plan interface. Here users can list contributors to a grant, including their ORCIDs, and select a role for each individual. This feature utilizes the CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy to describe each contributor’s specific contribution. Using ORCIDs and a controlled vocabulary for roles will facilitate the tracking of key people involved in the project. This will allow contributors to receive credit for their work and will enable other stakeholders involved in the project to identify the key individuals involved.

Project start/end dates

To support our machine-actionable DMP work, we have added project start and end dates to the project details page. Having these key project dates as part of the DMP is essential in triggering actions at the appropriate moment. For example, a project end data can trigger an action to notify key stakeholders, such as repository managers or storage administrators, at the end of the grant.

What’s next?

Together with our DMPRoadmap colleagues, we are currently upgrading our infrastructure to Rails 5. This is a substantial piece of development work that, although entirely on the backend and invisible to users, is essential to keeping our service running and adding additional requested features. We expect this development to be completed in July.

Following the Rails upgrade, work will continue on our maDMP initiative and we plan on pushing out a feature to mint DOIs for DMPs late this summer. Additional features we are developing simultaneously include: support for multiple datasets within a DMP, an updated API and the ability to export plans as JSON, and a new template builder to facilitate the creation of maDMP templates within the application. We’ll continue to update you here as development work progresses.

As always, feedback or questions are most welcome and can be sent directly to maria.praetzellis@ucop.edu.