Institutions Selected to Pilot Development of Scalable Data-Management Infrastructure

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the California Digital Library (CDL) have selected five institutional teams to pilot the integration or creation of prototypes and possible workflows for machine-actionable data management and sharing plans (maDMSPs). The pilot project will run January–December 2024. This project is funded by an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant. Additional information about the project is on our project webpage.

Machine-actionable data management and sharing plans are structured, machine-readable documents that allow for dynamic reporting on the intentions and outcomes of a research project, enabling streamlined information exchange across relevant parties and systems. These plans go beyond traditional static document-based DMSPs, and contain an inventory of key metadata about a project and its outputs (not just datasets), with a change history that stakeholders can query for information over the lifetime of the research. Implementing maDMSPs can be a key piece of establishing interconnected, automated systems for research data management and compliance.

The maDMSPs pilot institutions will help shape the development of maDMSPs and gain valuable early experience with new approaches to enable more automated and connected research data management. The institutions are:

• Arizona State University
• Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
• Pennsylvania State University
• University of California, Riverside
• University of Colorado, Boulder

An additional five institutions have been selected for the maDMSP extended cohort that will engage closely with the pilot cohort.