Our monthly newsletter will keep you updated about new features, functionality, and important days for your calendar. 

DMPonline enhanced client customisations – process revisited

DMPonline is free for users to use but with the subscription you gain the access to the administrative interface. The benefit of subscribing to our enhanced package is that on top of all the admin functionalities, you get to customise the pages, so they get to look and feel like your institutional pages. In February 2021 we re-visited the process for adding new customised client pages and discussed what seems to work well and what we can still improve from the lessons learned from the past year to ensure we onboard new institutions even with a smaller developer team. Areas where we wanted to focus on was avoiding lengthy back and forth communications around changes to the customised pages, ongoing requests for minor changes and identifying how this process can be further improved to avoid any delays and provide transparency of this process.

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DMPonline demo sessions – summary from the past few months  

As many of you already know by now - we have launched demo session in September 2020, and we have been running these regularly since. We have re-visited our session planning with recent survey about what you want us to focus on in the following months, and we have planned the demo sessions for the upcoming 6 months based on your feedback. Although all notes from these meetings are shared across and function as a living document for reference for all of you, and we put all the videos on the YouTube demo session playlist, we thought it might be useful to also share with you a short blog post with the summary of the recent sessions.
 
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DMPonline team updates for the past month

Our software development team is still working very hard to get through fixing all the bugs that occurred during the Rails5 upgrade. We put together a public page where you can see the list of bugs we work through, for more transparency.  On the non-software development end – Patricia presented DMPonline in March’s workshop on DMP tools hosted by the German DINI/nestor working group on data management plans; Diana and Theo have submitted the poster for the IDCC conference about the user experience administrative interface survey – so do join us on IDCC to find out more. We have been also busy testing bug fixes, updating our new CRM – Salesforce, and like we mentioned in the last issue - we started to plan a DMPonline virtual user group for June – so keep an eye on Twitter, and upcoming newsletter for more detail! And get in touch with us if you wish to take part!

Short summary from the March drop-in session

During our March DMPonline drop-in session, we were joined by Lindsey Myers who shared with us how the University of York manages their RDM services. Lindsey is part of the Open Research team which is in place since 2014 working with the metadata team (which does checks on recorded datasets) and their subscriptions team on APCs. The Open Research team provides guidance and training on research data, open access, copyright, REF, and bibliometrics. This group works around their publication repository which they share with Sheffield and Leeds as part of the White Rose consortium. Their team covers a wide range with individual team members picking a focus area. Lindsey’s is RDM. Lindsey shared with us that during pandemic – they had some successes and have few things in the pipeline. For instance, they managed to get data file upload to Pure enabled – they use this as their current research information system and also as a data catalogue. Researchers can now also provide the file through Pure and it is not just metadata record  that is available through the York research database. They also managed to make it possible to transfer large data files. They were very lucky to collaborate with colleagues in IT Services that provided support in this outside of Pure which has a limit of 20 GB per file. They also managed to put together research data York advisory group –which is an attempt to coordinate activities across different teams that feed into this good data management. The key individuals are there to work together in advisory group, for instance, information governance, IT services (including Research Software Engineers) and also digital archivist. They put together some guidance how to handle data with restricted access which just got approved by their strategy group. They also started an Open Research Advocates Network and have currently recruited 16 people that investigate best practices in their disciplines which will allow them to provide more discipline specific advice in future. The following service offerings are in their pipeline:

• Data repository business case as PURE is not fit for purpose
• A more sustainable DMP review service – it's just her and if she’s not around it doesn’t happen
• Data wrangling skills – currently looking at a survey to see which skills around data science might be needed.

To find out more, catch up with our recording listen here.

DMPonline demo session - Guidance

Stepping up to a new ‌DMP‌ ‌challenge, by Helen Foster, Bev Jones, Rosie Higman