Data Management Plans - A tool for everyday life?

Could a Data Management Plan (DMP) be a useful tool in scientific everyday life?

DMPs should document the handling of research data before, during and after the project period. Therefore, DMPs could be FAIR for the researchers and his/ her data management. Normally, templates for DMPs are questionnaires that guide the researcher in a structured way through the most important subjects of research data management. Essentially, they are based on the model of the research data lifecycle. This approach leads often to too generic templates. A disadvantage of generic templates is that they do not reveal the benefit of a DMP to the researcher. As a result, DMPs are perceived as too bureaucratic and extensive. Most researchers in Germany perceive DMPs only as an additional burden. Accordingly, they are hardly ever created on a voluntary basis; an intrinsic motivation, such as the improvement of the own research data management or research processes is usually lacking. To support the creation of DMPs with a tool, RWTH relies on the Research Data Management Organizer (RDMO), which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

How can we make DMPs more attractive to the researchers and useful in scientific work?

At RWTH Aachen the creation of DMPs is recommended via its guidelines for research data management. Based on this background, RWTH offers its own DMP template with a focus on the natural sciences and technology. Although this template totally limits the areas and questions, but it is still too generic. In order to break up these generics, we adopt the approach of offering subject- and/ or institution-specific DMP templates. In order to develop the discipline-specific template, we started with the RDMO template and tried to reduce it for engineering science together with scientists in workshops. The product is a template which is mainly adapted to the helping texts and answering options

For an institute-specific adjustment, we organized an initial and concluding workshop with scientists from a research college. In the meantime of the two workshops, the scientists have answered 2-3 questions from each area of the life cycle every two weeks. The product is a short template with the for these scientists most important questions.

Our experiences show that there is quite a gap between the generic templates and specifically adapted templates. But, according to our knowledge, also the specifically adapted templates are not used regularly. What options are there to make the DMP concept useful for everyday work?