DMPready
The problem for users of service providers
During a research project, all or part of the data life cycle may be carried out by a service provider. When drafting a Data Management Plan (DMP), the scientist using such a service provider often has difficulty locating relevant information and unambiguously characterizing how the data have been managed within the partnership. The perceived difficulty in accessing this information, interpreting it, and transcribing it into the DMP is sometimes so great that it can result in the simple quotation of the supplier involved without further precision, or even in the complete loss of information that is essential to the DMP.
The problem for service providers
With today’s strong DMP writing dynamics, service providers are increasingly being asked by their users to provide intelligible and immediately usable information in their DMPs. This generates a workload that can be significant, especially when there is a technical gap between the service provider and the user, which complicates the dialogue. At the very least, this situation generates frustration for everyone and sometimes a fragility in the traceability of the management of Research data, particularly as it appears in the DMPs.
The solution provided by DMPready
From the service provider’s perspective
The idea with DMPready is to make available on its website a dedicated page that brings together all the necessary information and a pre-written proposal of a text that can be directly transposed into a Data Management Plan. This page will become the reference point for users to draft their DMP. The resource provider will explicitly identify this page so that it can be referenced by search engines with the title “DMPready”. It is strongly advised to follow the http://www.fournisseur-de-ressources.fr/dmpready standardization as an entry point (this page can be a redirection to another already existing one). It is important that each change in the data management processes at the service provider be associated with a new version of information whose validity in time must be limited. Older versions must remain available. This ensures that the information made available is consistent with the data management as implemented.
From the user’s point of view
Users of service providers are invited to develop the information available from the providers with whom they work by introducing them to the “DMPready” approach, if necessary, and by providing them with the most pragmatic feedback possible regarding the relevance of the information made available and its appropriateness to the DMP’s construction needs. This interaction will improve the quality of the information made available by the service provider. Moreover, if the service provider adheres to the “DMPready” dynamic, it will also contribute to improving the overall quality of the pages of all the service providers, which will be homogenized by linking them via https://www.dmpready.org.
The role of DMPready.org
The sine qua non condition for this initiative to be useful to all is of course that the vocabulary used is both precise enough to characterise the information needed to draft the DMP, but also that this vocabulary is comprehensible to the user. The role of DMPready.org is to facilitate the emergence of this balance by listing the providers adhering to the philosophy of this label, which will facilitate the collective standardization of the vocabulary used through the sharing of pages already written. The census will be carried out through a combination of the declaration of the suppliers themselves (declare your dedicated web page at contact@dmpready.org) and regular search engine analysis based on the term “DMPready”. The “DMPready” label is not audited by dmpready.org, which only acts as a facilitator in the creation of information useful for the construction of DMPs and serves as an aggregator ensuring the neutrality of this initiative. The information disseminated under the label by service providers is therefore under their own responsibility.
