Making data management plans actionable and public

The California Digital Library (CDL) and Digital Curation Centre (DCC) have achieved important successes in first-generation service offerings for data management plans (DMPs). The CDL’s DMPTool and the DCC’s DMPonline focus specifically on supporting US and UK researchers in fulfilling their data management planning obligations arising from funder mandates, pre-publication requirements, and institutional policies. Our organizations are now merging our platforms to co-develop a core infrastructure that will reposition DMPs as living documents useful for structuring the course of research activities and integrating with other data management systems and workflows. Once we release the new platform, we will begin implementing use cases for machine-actionable DMPs that make this possible. 

Per the Data Documentation Initiative definition, machine-actionable “refers to information that is structured in a consistent way so that machines can be programmed against the structure.” The goal of machine-actionable DMPs, then, is to facilitate good data management and reuse practices (think FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) by enabling:

• Institutions to manage their data

• Funders to mine the DMPs they receive

• Infrastructure providers to plan their resources

• Researchers to discover data

This term is consistent with the RDA Active DMPs Interest Group and FORCE11 FAIR DMPs group mission statements, and it seems to capture what most stakeholders are thinking: i.e., we want to move beyond static text files to create a dynamic inventory of digital research methods, protocols, environments, software, articles, data, and other related outputs.

 Here we present outlines of concrete use cases for machine-actionable DMPs, which we will develop further through community engagement over the coming months. In a related effort, we are also designing workflows to promote the idea of DMPs as public, open, discoverable resources. Our work already supports the US and UK domains and is being adopted in many other countries; a single system offers a single point of interoperation and an opportunity to promote open scholarship at a global scale.