Rec. 21: Use information held in Data Management Plans

[sjDCC]

DMPs hold valuable information on the data and related outputs, which should be structured in a way to enable reuse. Investment should be made in DMP tools that adopt common standards to enable information exchange across the FAIR data ecosystem.

• DMPs should be explicitly referenced in systems containing information about research projects and their outputs (CRIS). Relevant standards and metadata profiles, should consider adaptations to include DMPs as a specific project output entity (rather than inclusion in the general category of research products). The same should apply to FAIR Data Objects. Stakeholders: Standards bodies; Global coordination fora; Data services.

• A DMP standard should be developed that is extensible (e.g. like Dublin Core) by discipline (e.g. Darwin Core) or by the characteristics of the data (e.g. scale, sensitivity), or the data type (specific characteristics and requirements of the encoding). Stakeholders: Standards bodies; Global coordination fora; Data services.

• Work is necessary to make DMPs machine readable and actionable. This includes the development of concepts and tools to support the creation of useful and usable data management plans tied to the actual research workflows. Stakeholders: Funders; Data services; Data stewards.

• DMPs themselves should conform to FAIR principles and be Open where possible. Stakeholders: Data services; Research communities; Policymakers.

• Information gathered from the process of implementing and evaluating DMPs relating to conformity, challenges and good practices should be used to improve practice. Stakeholders: Data services; Funders; Research communities; Global coordination fora

[ghost]

4TU.Centre for Research Data position: Should a DMP registry / catalogue be part of this recommendation? In previous recommendations a registry was mentioned, and it would make sense as part of the FAIR eco-system.

[katerbow]

DFG position: Recommendation 21 refers to the Recommendation 12 and seems rather ambitious. Given the fact that DMPs still are not a widely accepted standard procedure, it sounds somewhat far-fetched to list DMPs in CRIS systems already now or to make them machine-readable.

Furthermore, to demand the development of a DMP-standard seems not to respect discipline specific requirements on data sharing in an appropriate manner – including the fact that acceptance of working with a DMP is based on a specific working culture. Therefore, this recommendation is considered as interesting and suitable for implementation at the time after data management and data sharing has become a standard practice in research.

[ScienceEurope]

Science Europe agrees with the recommendation in general. It should however be taken into account that DMPs are still not widely accepted standard procedures. Therefore, this recommendations could better be taken into account at the time that data management and data sharing have become standard in research.

[ferag]

http://hdl.handle.net/10261/157765 Chapter 4.3.3

[pkdoorn]

Thumbs up, DMPs can be considered as important metadata!

[mromanie]

ESO position Discipline-specific DMPs may be needed to support this added functionality.

[fniccolucci]

Fully agree with this recommendation. The standardisation process for DMP should start as soon as possible, to avoid that we will end up with plenty of "legacy" DMPs. This also in view of machine-actionability. The use of standard vocabularies is part of this process. Moreover, standardisation helps multingualism, a feature that has been somehow forgotten in this discussion. See https://www.change.org/p/uni%C3%B3n-europea-manifiesto-en-defensa-del-multiling%C3%BCismo-cient%C3%ADfico

[gtoneill]

Some overlap with Recommendation 12 related to DMPs. Perhaps merge?